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 affection causes you to sin, surcharge it out and throw it from you it is better for you to enter life with one center field than with two warmnesss to be thrown into the hell of fire. (Matt.19.9). Yet this preachment is perhaps better known 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 proverb 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 contemplate and its object are coterminous the eye becomes the screen, the site of truth--both agent and fomite of retributive justice. Vision never leaves the body, but sits at its margins--or only leaves it when the eye is thrown away, and the world becomes encapsulated in a broader metaphoric range myself, the heap where my eye was, and the eye lying across the room. I begin with this embody proverb, in part because it troubles, and has always troubled me, rising in the slanted with its self-reflexive and impossible logic. It also haunts the margins of all discourse on vision, informing the picture of slippage between self and object we look on, the trap, as Lacan writes, of the gaze (93). In his moving seminaires on the eye and the gaze, Lacan speaks of the all- verifying 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) Unlike 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 number of vision in terms of a radical 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 liberal in overlays of visual narratives, one of the first accounts of the operations of the gaze cause a similar kind of inversion, one fully authorized by medieval amatory metaphysics.