Lesley Kordecki

“Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism”

I would like to examine a strange moment in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls when the debate about a fitting mate for the formel eagle is abandoned by Nature immediately after an avian altercation that seems to go nowhere.  But perhaps this argument will lead us to read the poem in a less human-restricted way.  The most dramatic dialogue occurs when the merlin verbally attacks the cuckoo about its “nature.” The birds are no longer talking about which bird will win the formel; now the habits of the nest-stealing and “murdering” cuckoo bring the whole debate to a halt.  The well-known political allegory equating species of birds with classes of men may be in effect, but if we think about this as nonhuman mating, we are up a different tree, producing a considerably more complex reading.

The cuckoo is accused, apropos of nothing in the plot of the dream vision, of its characteristic brood parasitism.  This behavior in birds, prevalent in cuckoos and cowbirds, describes the commandeering of another species’ nest by the depositing of one’s young in it and eliminating, if necessary, the host’s eggs or young, a phenomenon now labeled, anthropomorphically, as the “mafia effect.”  The Middle Ages knew about this practice of various avian species.  I argue that our understanding or lack thereof of brood parasitism has now devolved in criticism into a form of anthropomorphism in that cuckoos are seen as thieving and murderous men.  But nest appropriation is interesting in its own nonhuman sense, especially since the term “anthropomorphism” itself requires investigation for literary critics who work to untangle human allegory from animal presence in texts.  Anthropomorphism can indeed be a kind of colonization of the nonhuman, a science-backed assumption, now being challenged, that all emotion, for example, is human, reserving all such fertile literary material for people, not beasts or birds.

So is it possible that we observe the conduct of the female cuckoo (interestingly, not the male, as in the poem), and misinterpret it, imposing a mythic anthropomorphic meaning upon the poem?  And does Chaucer, who apparently knows this startling avian conduct that confounds human ideological expectations, work it for another, perhaps humorous, purpose?  In the Parliament, Chaucer has the aggressive bird of prey, the merlin, ironically imply that the cuckoo’s brood parasitism seems some kind of brutal and “unnatural” intervention.  On the contrary, it may well be an enactment of interspecies nurturance that either enhances or subverts the procreative project of this story about birds mating in the spring.  Most provocatively, why does the poem give the nest-stealing, “murdering” cuckoo a line advocating “commune spede,” or communal good, the lesson the dreamer’s guide tries to teach him?  By taking the nonhuman material more literally, we may detect the strange implication that interspecies nest appropriation in the end becomes a mode of communal profit.  After all, the more culturally resistant cuckoo altogether debunks the classist/speciesest debate.  The poem may emerge as more witty and wise if we step back from our overdetermined interpretation of animal behavior as merely human allegory.