Chaucer is my Homeboy
A man is not a sinner with his wife,
He cannot hurt himself with his own knife;
We have the law’s permission thus to play.- Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Merchant’s Tale”
i’m perhaps the least qualified person to speak of Lacanian theory, given that i am one of the few remaining english lit students in my cohort yet to have taken module on literature and psychoanalysis. but, this much i think i can comment on: Chaucer’s very clever pun on “knife” alludes to what Lacan happily calls the Symbolic Order.
January speaks of the law of his religion that allows him to express, within the sanctioned domain of his marriage, the full play of his carnal urges. that is, it is marriage that allows him to labour however much for “lawful procreation”. in that sense, May his wife is preconfigured by the religious discourse not only as a child-bearing machine but also as a pleasure factory for her man Janurary. the phallic knife here represents the phallocentric Symbolic Order which governs and shields January’s life: it is a “knife” that protects January and his peers, rather than one which harms.
more importantly, it is the “knife” that is “his own”, constructed to carve and disfigure the body of May accordingly. the text of May’s body is that which is reinscribed like a tabula rasa and penetrated by January’s symbolic phallus.
yet, the rhyme between “wife” and “knife” seems to suggest a possible connection between May and the Symbolic Order. my quick interpretation would be that in being fashioned accordingly by January’s symbolic phallus, May is made into a similar “knife” which articulates or rather, ventriloquizes the same phallocentric language. it is here that perhaps January’s symbolic violence on May comes full circle. “we have the law’s permission to play” but the game is a masturbatory one.
maybe i’m wrong to say this, but i suspect that Chaucer might just be a proto-Lacanian. or perhaps, others might accuse the mind of jerking off to itself again, if you would excuse the ribald expression.
