Chaucers Canterbury Tales - Knights Tale :: Chaucer Knights Tale Essays

Chaucers Knights Tale Now you See it, Now you Dont In the Matthean discourse on sin and the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and spill it from you it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. (Matt.19.9). Yet this homily is perhaps better know through the compressed poetry of the King James translation. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Grahically and even grotesquely materialized, the eye is that which offends, that which slides, with terrible corporeality, from the body to the table. In this motto of the visual, it or that which requires excision in the offense, is the self, in an erasure of exteriority. There is no object, no objective it that offends. The gaze and its object are coterminous the eye becomes the screen, the locate of truth--both agent and vehicle of retributive justice. Vision never leaves the body, but sits at its margins--or only leaves it when the ey e is thrown away, and the world becomes encapsulated in a broader metaphoric pad myself, the hole where my eye was, and the eye lying across the room. I begin with this embodied proverb, in part because it troubles, and has always troubled me, rising in the distressing with its self-reflexive and impossible logic. It also haunts the margins of all discourse on vision, informing the point of slippage between self and object we look on, the trap, as Lacan writes, of the gaze (93). In his mournful seminaires on the eye and the gaze, Lacan speaks of the all-seeing spectacle of the world, the inside-out structure of the gaze that fixes us in front of what we see (75) What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. (106) unconnected the it of the Matthean proverb, Lacans eye stands apart from the interplay between subject and object, the ocelli as distinct from the gaze yet both texts seem to describe the act of vision in wrong of a radic al discontinuity between what we see and the self that perceives it both have us fixed before a world--and in Matthew we respond like Oedipus, with self-castration. In Chaucers Knigthts Tale, a tale rich in overlays of visual narratives, one of the first accounts of the operations of the gaze effects a similar kind of inversion, one fully authorized by medieval amatory metaphysics.