It is no surprise that this exploration of the flaws of human interpretation came in the form of a tale about lowly barnyard animals. By bringing the ideas that Chaucer’s is wrestling with to a level as low as that of barnyard animals, Chaucer is able to clearly demonstrate how silly we look when we misunderstand or misinterpret tales. However, it is less apparent exactly what kind of tale Chaucer intends this to be. To alleviate this uncertainty, it would be best to appeal to R.T Lenaghan’s essay that talks about the distinction between fable and fabula. The terms are often used interchangeably, but according to Lenaghan, “Fabula has a specific meaning. It is one of the three kinds of narration… a fictitious narration of something that could not have happened. The passage assumes the utility of rhetorical categories for literary analysis and implies that literature is essentially embellish- ment or elegant paraphrase. It also places the analytic concern with embellishment or para- phrase in the classroom”. If we choose to understand this tale as fabula we are able to free ourselves from the punctilious restrictions of a strict allegory, while still addressing the larger educational connotations of the authorial challenge provided by Chaucer. However, we lose the ability to read a tale with the irony that comes with the telling of a fable and subsequently the tale loses much of its charm. As such, it is critical to seriously consider Lenaghan’s assertion that The Nun’s Priest’s tale “Read as fabula in the rhetorical sense of fictitious narrative, the tale exemplifies a medieval view of literature and a way of writing it. Read as a sophisticated telling of a fable, in the manner of La Fontaine, it invites the expectation of complex irony”. While the parameters of the fabula make the tale easier to interpret, the idea that the tale can be read as a fable is critical to undertaking the authorial challenge in the first place. If we want to succeed in our task we must accept that this particular bestiary contains elements of both and accept the messiness that comes with that assertion. With this newfound understanding of the text’s genre class, we are prepared to approach the text’s second hint, the nature of misinterpreted dreams.
There is already an inherent critique hidden within the tale disguised as an interpretation of a dream. Within the tale Chanticleer and his lady Pertelote attempt to find meaning in his cryptic dreams. Chanticleer concludes that his dreams might mean something but is unable to do anything with the meaning that he concocts. Not to mention “After Chanticleer shares his dream with Pertelote, there is a 264-line debate over its meaning, a veritable encyclopedia of much of what the "experts" had said to date on the significance and meaning of dreams”. It is the multiplicity of interpretations that indicate a failure on the part of the interpreter to properly understand the situation. While there can be some debate about the influence of medieval convention on dreams, Steven Krueger helps alleviate that criticism in his essay “Dreaming in The Middle Ages”. Here he asserts that “in considering the influence of the dream books – and certainly of more recondite theoretical material – we cannot presuppose the literary artist's familiarity with any particular idea; nor can we assume that authors would necessarily have used that dream lore with which they were demonstrably familiar. In creating a fictional dream, the writer may have a specific theory of dreaming in mind and may depend on that theory to create certain literary effects”. This perspective gives us the freedom that we need to suspect that Chaucer was doing something unique with dreams in this tale.
