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

Chaucers Knights Tale instantaneously you See it, Now you Dont In the Matthean deal on sin and the domain of heaven, Jesus says, And if your substance causes you to sin, inebriate it out and throw it from you it is better for you to inscribe life with wiz eye than with two eyes to be throw into the hell of fire. (Matt.19.9). Yet this homily is perhaps better known with 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 maxim 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(prenominal) agent and vehicle of retri entirelyive justice. Vision never leaves the body, but sits at it s margins--or only leaves it when the eye is thrown away, and the world becomes encapsulated 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 profligate 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 confront 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(predicate) 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 aside from the interplay between subject and object, the ocelli as distinct from the gaze yet both texts seem to de scribe 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 Chaucers Knigthts Tale, a tale rich in overlays of visual narratives, one of the offset printing accounts of the operations of the gaze effects a similar kind of inversion, one fully authorized by medieval amatory metaphysics.