Animal Noises in The Reeve's Tale

The Chaucer Reading Challenge continues

Dear Reader,

I have been down with the flu for a few days and so have fallen behind in my writing. Furthermore, my beloved dog Abby died suddenly last weekend. It’s been a rough week. I thought, however, that instead of foregoing PCF completely this week, I would instead offer you this unpublished essay that I wrote a few years ago on The Reeve’s Tale. I offer it as something of a memorial to Abby, since it celebrates the thematic centrality of animals in Chaucer.

Yours,

John

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The Reeve in The Ellesmere Manuscript

In a memorable passage in The Reeve’s Tale, the badly behaved northern clerk Allen remarks to his colleague John about the remarkable music deriving from the various bodily noises of their sleeping host, Symkyn the Miller, and his family: “Herdtwo evere slyk a sang er now? / Lo, whilk a cowplyng is ymel hem alle” (I.4170-4171). The Riverside Chaucer silently emends cowplyng, prefering complyn, or “compline,” the final divine service of the day. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor’s recent edition, based, like The Riverside, on the Ellesmere Manuscript preserves cowplyng and suggests that Allen mispronounces the word, making a pun with coupling and thus blasphemously concatenating the holy service and sex.

This reading may seem difficult to sustain, since this coupling “among them all” would include not only Symkyn and his wife but also their twenty-year-old daughter, and indeed to The Riverside editors it may seem like a scribal error so obvious that it does not even require comment in the textual notes. On the other hand, Allen’s actions in the Tale suggests a perversity entirely capable of imagining such a familial threesome. Robert Pratt in his edition also prefers complyn but is a bit more forthcoming than The Riverside in his textual notes, explaining that most of the best manuscripts read cowplyng but that “the extensive parody of the language, prayers, and themes of the Compline liturgy” in the course of the tale point to this alternative reading.

While I am agnostic regarding these editorial choices, the Ellesmere reading of cowplyng would take into account both the tale’s interest in eccentric pronunciation and the tendency of the Chaucerian fabliau (a genre conflating comedy and cuckoldry) to conflate religious ritual with sex, the more perverse the better, and with the reality of bodily sensation more generally.

In today’s installment, I would like to argue that this tendency in the fabliaux (the tales of the Miller, Reeve, Cook, Shipman, and Merchant) is a more visceral iteration of a pervasive tendency in Chaucer’s poetry: the use of representations of sound and vision, along with animal metaphors, to imagine a boundary between the animal and the human that is permeable, a boundary that, at least in experimental fictional spaces, can disappear entirely.

Indeed, the interpretation of natural, animalistic sounds as human cultural markers, as I have argued elsewhere, gets the whole ball rolling, as the birdsong that is the first sound recorded in the Tales sets off a wave of cultural associations, in which animals are often treated as willing participants in human culture, that stops only with the silencing of the crow at the end of The Manciple’s Tale—thus framing the entirety of the sequence’s fictional space with the sounds of birds.

The word that the narrator uses to describe that birdsong, melodye, is the same that the Reeve as narrator uses to describe the snoring and farting of Symkin and his wife and daughter, which he also compares to the sounds of a horse. As with the opening birdsong, therefore, the animalistic and the cultural are conflated in sound, though this time it is humans making animalistic noises rather than birds seeming to participate in human culture. Furthermore, the noise can be heard from two “furlongs” away, a unit of measure derived from the typical length of a furrow made by a horse-drawn or ox-drawn plow, bringing to mind an acoustic community filled with animal noises made by creatures vital to human, cultural endeavor.

Susan Crane has written that “Animal, synonymous with beast in Middle English, sometimes encompasses and other times contrasts with what is meant by human; the fate of each concept is bound to the other.”¹ She goes on to quote John of Trevisa, Chaucer’s near contemporary, who in his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s On the Properties of Things, certainly frames the human as a subcategory of the animal: “And al that is comprehended in fleissh and of spiryte of lif and body and of soule is ycleped animal, ‘a best,’ whethur it be ayry as fowil, or wattry as fissh that swymmeth, other erthy bestes that goth on grounde and in feldes, as men and bestes wilde and tame” (quoted in Crane, 173).

It is notable that Trevisa chooses the word soul here, since medieval philosophy usually holds that only humans and not other animals possess immortal souls, though he may mean something like Aristotle’s idea of an animating spirit, which is common to all living creatures. He goes on to specify, however, that the human is an animal who resembles God. The source of this divine resemblance, presumably, is the divine gift of reason (Aquinas classified humans as “rational animals”) and, by extension, the ability to use language.

Spoken language in The Reeve’s Tale, from the very first bits of dialogue, as Tolkien noted decades ago, is presented in terms of what it sounds like, as the northern clerks’ accent creates an immediate comic effect—what must have been fairly easy laughs for a southern audience. To this day, the stand-up comic’s laziest trick is a funny accent, because it marks the speaker not by intellect but by sound, just as one marks an animal by the sound it makes.

This effect creates a binary between “normalcy” and Other which can be astonishingly local, especially in England with its microclimates of local accents. And though the presentation of accents will vary depending on their origin, the binary is still in place, which carries the assumption that the world is divided between accent and no-accent. This binary is similar in its reductive quality to the human/animal binary that Derrida questions in “The Animal that Therefore I Am.” Different animals make all sorts of different noises, but they are all animal noises, distinct from human language, this despite the fact that animals are as different from each other (or more so) as they are different from humans, but we still classify them together as “animal.” “The animal,” writes Derrida, “what a word! The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature.”²

By treating spoken language as sound, by calling attention to its sound, the tale both invokes and pushes against both of these boundaries at once, between accent and no-accent and between human and non-human, or animal. Spoken language is timbre, volume, and pitch, defined by whether it resonates from the chest or through the nose, by whether or not the tongue recedes when the sound projects. In fact, Chaucer sometimes removes specific language from speech altogether and presents it as pure sound. Late at night, after dinner and much drinking, Symkyn “yexeth, and he speketh thurgh the nose / As he were on the quakke or on the pose” (4151-4152).

Though we think of “the quakke” as the sound that a duck makes, the earliest usage in this sense recorded in the OED dates back to the sixteenth century, though it is possible that this sense was common in spoken English long before then. Here it seems to mean that he sounds hoarse, as if he has a cold. But in either case, whether he sounds like a duck or like he has a cold, it is the sound of Symkyn’s voice that is described rather than his choice of words. He belches; he speaks through his nose; he quacks, perhaps like a duck. And, of course, when he is not speaking, but is asleep with his family, he sounds like a horse and can be heard from a distance of two furlongs.

Of course, it is an incident involving an animal, specifically a horse, that moves the plot in The Reeve’s Tale, as Symkyn releases the clerk’s stallion in order to distract them from his blatant theft of much of their milled wheat. V. A. Kolve’s classic reading of the tale considers the unbridled horse iconographically as a signal of the removal of reason and the surrender to base instinct.³ And indeed the tale partly supports this reading, as the horse sounds its “wehee” (4065) upon release and gallops off in pursuit of the wild mares in the fen.

This “wehee” is a point at which animal sound and human language converges. It is, of course, a means of signifying the horse’s sound through human language, much as we might use “woof” or “meow” to signify the sounds of a dog or cat, but it is not only that. While both the OED and the MED define the word as a conventional representation of a horse’s whinny, it can also be used to elicit a response from a horse. John Skelton, in the early sixteenth century, uses it to represent laughter, rhyming it with “tehee,” which is familiar to any reader of Chaucer from Alisoun’s “Tehee, quod she” from The Miller’s Tale. It is horse noise and human noise, but it is also recorded in dictionaries and can thus be considered language; in both cases it is expressive of feeling without signifying specifically; it hovers between language and noise.

But the horse isn’t the only one who runs and makes wild noises. The clerks set off in pursuit, and as they try to catch the beast, they call out: “With ‘Keepe! Keepe! Stand! Stand! Jossa! Warderere! / Ga whistle thou and I shal kepe hym here.’” As the clerks call out their exclamations and whistle, they sound like beasts, just as Pertolote in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale sounds like both a person and a chicken when she exclaims “Herte dere!”⁴

This merging of human and animal noise reflects the fact that in this pursuit, the horse and the clerks are involved in the same cognitive enterprise; they both understand what is going on, and they both know each others’ goals. Most of the time, we occupy different cognitive spaces from our domestic animals, even when we share a physical space. When I walk my dog, for example, we are having different phenomenological experiences: I’m usually listening to a podcast or an audiobook on my headphones, while she is totally absorbed by the smells, sights, and sounds of her environment. When we play, however, we are both involved in the same game, and we both understand each other and our respective goals with regard to play. As Montaigne famously remarks in the Apology, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that it is not she who is playing with me?”

In the case of the released horse in the tale, we can all see the scenario in our mind’s eye: a horse attempting to evade two human pursuers. What quickly becomes clear when we imagine this scene is the fact that if the horse were really intent on escaping captivity and nothing else, then the clerks could never catch him. Indeed, we might make several points about the horse’s perspective here, rarely considered, as far as I know, in the critical literature.

Anyone who has interacted with domestic animals would understand that it is probable that once he recognizes the pursuit, the horse draws the clerks into what he sees as play, and in their shouts to each other, they seem willing participants as they utter their human variants of “wehee” and pursue him with their urgent whistling. In this sense, the horse and the humans are playing the same game, though with different stakes. The horse here finds himself in what we might consider a very human philosophical position, in a liminal space between freedom and contingency, between the excitement of the new and the gravitational pull of contented domesticity, between the comforts of home with its regular feeding times and the thrill of illicit sex.

This is a much more complicated negotiation than Kolve’s binary of reason and base instinct would suggest. It is a negotiation that reenacts in microcosm the space for play initiated by Harry Bailly—whose parameters of contingency mark fixed boundaries within which freedom and self-expression might operate—for a time (though his interruptions of various pilgrims, including Chaucer himself, remind us that such freedom is never entirely “unbridled”). Earlier in the first fragment, the Knight uses an animal metaphor to mark these boundaries when he says that the oxen in his plow are weak, and he has a large field to work and limited time for the telling of his long tale. But while the Knight sees the Host’s mandate as work, the Miller and Reeve, in their different ways, understand it as spirited competition—as play (though in the Reeve’s case especially, it is aggressive, vengeful play, the object of which is to humiliate one’s opponent).

That the Reeve sees the Host’s mandate in this way is clear from his prologue, where he also marks the binary of freedom and domestic comfort with a metaphor that compares his position as an old man to a horse in winter who can no longer play in the field but must eat his hay in the barn. The fact that elements of this metaphor are enacted literally in the tale suggests that this is more than a rhetorical figure. It is part of a pattern through the narrative space of the Tales in which human and animal experiences combine, overlap, and sometimes become equivalent.

Horseplay, or horse-non-play in the case of the Reeve, becomes indistinguishable from human-play: they are the same game. The horseplay of the tale seems vicariously to fulfill the impotent desires of the aging Reeve, who, he says still has a “colt’s tooth,” like the Wife of Bath, but whose age prevents any such escapades. These horse-related metaphors form part of a pattern in both the prologue and the tale that critics have referred to as the Reeve’s tendency to a stylistic “naturalism.”

His rhetorical figures tend toward the pastoral or, perhaps, the georgic. Indeed, he casts his own existential position through a series of very earthy similes and metaphors—from the animal to the vegetable. He compares his old heart to an “open-ers” (3871), or a medlar, a sort of plum that is colloquially called an open-ers because of its laxative qualities. “That ilke fruyt is ever leng the wers, / Till it be roten in mullok or in stree” (3872-3873). It is, he says, a fruit that gets worse until it rots in the garbage. He compares himself also to a leek, because he has a grey head and a green tail. His metaphorical language follows a downward trajectory from animal to vegetable, and finally to the inanimate, as he famously imagines his life as a tapped keg from which death begins to draw the ale from the day he is born. While the horse may be granted the illusion of temporary freedom, and a fruit or vegetable may at least grow and draw life from the soil, a keg never lives or acts but is only acted upon.

The Reeve imagines human life as an entirely contingent experience, utterly without agency; our lives, for the Reeve, are indeed like those of kept animals, or fruits rotting in the garbage, or quickly draining kegs. Desire and will are ever at odds, as frustrating for us as for the horse in the barn, and apparent freedom, when it comes in youth, is always temporary and, ultimately, is an illusion. Though this seems harsh, it is not far in terms of philosophical perspective from the Boethian workings of fate in The Knight’s Tale—though the Reeve responds to contingency with burning resentment rather than with the kind of stoicism championed by Lady Philosophy in Boethius or Theseus in response to the death of Arcite.

In this context, the effect of the horse episode in the tale is not so much to contemplate a loss of reason, but rather to disrupt the connection between desire and will as well as to problematize desire as a coherent manifestation of the self. What does the horse want? Does he know?

Considering the chase from the perspective of the horse also refracts the calamitous remainder of the tale. As it does for the horse, the promise of illicit sex offers the temporary illusion of fulfilled desires. However, the desires of Allen and John are a result of their contingent position, and their rampaging disruption of the domestic space is emphasized through the increasing density of animal metaphors: Allen says Symkyn isn’t worth a fly, John considers himself an ape for being bested; John “priketh harde and sore as he were mad,” which directly recalls the horse’s galloping adventure; Allen calls Symkyn (who he thinks is John) a swine’s head; Allen and Symkyn are compared to two pigs in a poke.

Human will is reduced to Symkyn’s wife’s blind swing of her staff in the dark, which, of course, hits the wrong target. The noise of sex and violence has displaced human language. The Reeve has not so much animalized humanity as he has obliterated the human/animal binary altogether.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo taken in my local independent bookstore: The Haunted Bookshop, Mobile, AL.

1. See Crane, Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, page 1.

2. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008.

3. See Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative. Stanford University Press, 1984.

4. Imagine this spoken in an exaggerated Middle English recitation, and you will hear what I mean.