Barking Up the Wrong Tree? The Significance of the chienet in Old French Romance

The presence of dogs in medieval literary texts frequently attracts comment for reasons of symbolism or illustration, but rarely has the specifically narrative function of this creature been subjected to critical analysis. Cultural conceptions of the dog during the medieval period are characterized by a fundamental ambiguity; it is represented either as an unclean, quasi-heretical hell-hound, or else gentrified and even partly humanized as man's best friend. This paradox might invite a reading of the dog as something liminal or undecidable, an abjection which contaminates those literary texts in which the dog has a specific narrative function. Using examples from a number of mostly Old French texts, it is argued that this function often reveals a chaotic current in the text, demonstrating the workings of a disruptive underside of language which cannot be properly represented, but which disturbs the ordered system of the narrative.