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

Chaucer's Knight's Tale: Now you See it, Now you Don't  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   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 throw 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 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 gaze and its object are coterminous: the eye becomes the screen, the site 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 eye is thrown away, and the world becomes en capsulated in a broader metaphoric range: 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 dark 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 moving 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) Unlike the it of the Matthean proverb, Lacan's 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 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 Chaucer's Knigtht's 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.