4 - ‘Kek Kek’: Translating Birds in The Parliament of Fowls

Summary

The biosemiotic view that there exist signs, per se, in animal communication, or in any other communication among living systems, poses the question about the translatability of these signs, both by humans and by other organisms.

Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that Chaucer ever came across The Owl and the Nightingale, but given the remarkable similarities between this squabbling pair and the dissenting avian gang in his own bird-debate, you might think he had. Once again birds find themselves fruitful subjects for anthropomorphic conversion and so, too, do their habits resist these procedures, so that birds view themselves in both natural and cultural terms. Chaucer, however, adds a further dimension to the vociferous voices in The Parliament of Fowls: there is a moment when three of his talking birds suddenly drop human speech and revert to ‘birdspeak’, forcefully reversing anthropomorphic tactics and foregrounding the issue of birds’ voices. As we have seen in previous chapters, avian vocality presents a particularly compelling and troublesome example of birds’ strange familiarity. At once alike and unlike the human voice, it suggests and defies categories equally. In The Parliament, the din of birds from ‘every kynde that men thynke may’ (310) is transformed into human voices by the turn of allegory, but these birds are capable of re-translating themselves.

Lévi-Strauss's remarks on birdsong reminded us in my introduction that birds’ apparent ‘articulated language’ (langue articulé) is central to parallels that humans across cultures often seem to have drawn between themselves and birds. His choice of words, though, echoes a particularly medieval debate on the nature of the articulate, rational voice, in which birds were prominent precisely because their human-sounding vocalisations foregrounded and reified a central worry for medieval theologians: the distinction between rational man (animal rationale) and irrational beast (animal irrationale). Paradoxically, birds’ voices were ubiquitously compared to or depicted as human speech in various discourses because they display vocal abilities, even whilst being rigorously denied this likeness. Avian vocality, that is, could plausibly be considered discrete and articulate, sophisticated and adaptable, but such possibilities were hard to reconcile with mainstream doctrines that sought to secure the identity of the rational, vocalising human.