Jamey Hecht, PhD · Avian801@aol.com

The Broken Cup:

Knowledge, Scarcity, and Human Development

in Modernity, 1530 – 1946

Part One: Renaissance and Reformation

1. 1530’s

Limitations of Textuality in Thomas More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer.

Appeared in 16th Century Journal 1995

2. 1590’s

Giordano Bruno’s Infinity: the Return of the Repressed.

3. 1600

Oracular Discourse and the Waste of Foreknowledge in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

4. 1601

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Reformation Piety, and the Hermeneutic Burden.

Presented at 16th Century Studies Conference 1996.

5. 1674

Repression and Denial from Paradise Lost to The Warren Commission

Part Two: Romanticism and Modernity

6. 1818

Scarcity and Poetic Vocation in Two Sonnets of John Keats.

Appeared in English Literary History 1994

7. 1851

Compensation and Eschatology in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Appeared in Massachusetts Review 1998

8. 1855

Whitman’s Democratic Magic

9. 1920

Limitation and Being in Rilke’s French Fenetres Sequence.

10. 1932

Hart Crane and the Inheritance of Romantic Gnosticism. 

11. 1946

Dylan Thomas’ Modernism of Dissent.

12. 1950

“Ground” in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.

My cup runneth over: thus the 23rd Psalm figures the abundance of God’s love, and the consequent safety of the speaker.  Over against this imagined abundance, there threatens a scarcity comprised by all the needs that the Divine is understood to fulfill in a given culture.  The struggle against this scarcity has been, like the voyage of Odysseus, polytropic: it is constituted by the inexhaustible alphabet of tropes deployed by poets and thinkers living out their lives in a deepening interpretive crisis.  T.E. Hulme spoke of Romanticism as “spilt religion” (see also Colin Falck’s Myth, Truth, and Literature); Harold Bloom has employed the Kabalistic trope Breaking of the Vessels to denote the spillage that befalls the psyche in anxiety but which is profoundly enabling for poetic creation.  What Nietzsche called the “history of nihilism,” what Weber called the “Iron Cage” of modern social formations, what Leszek Kolakowski termed Modernity’s “endless trial,” this study interprets as a series of concatenated interpretive crises in Western thought which painfully broke an array of brimming little cups of  abundance and mixed their precious contents on scarcity’s vast field.

As a survey of a dozen texts spanning a period from the 1520’s to the end of the Second World War, this book is the history of my own reader-libido, my cathexes with twelve authors.  Over the course of a decade, I became interested in a constellation of writers with diverse rhetorical purposes (poetry, drama, science, theology, philosophy).  They turned out to have some salient issues in common, and taken together in sequence, they seemed to be articulating a larger syntactic unit; as though each author’s book were a word, and one might try to read any sentence they might be found configuring.  Because the texts I chose tended to be sites of conflict among incompatible ideas, I also took them each to be the representative of a larger (though far from global) cultural metabolism.

Guided by an attention to the rhetoric of scarcity and abundance (as prevalent in religious thought as it is in literature and economics), I found that the history of speaking subjects will always sound a whole lot like one big speaking subject, and that this subject can be found doing everything the psyche does: defending, working through, cracking up, and coming to terms -the whole arsenal and toolbox that avails in psychology also affords insight into the life of a culture over centuries.  To the admittedly limited degree that these assumptions are true, The Broken Cup narrates historically real transformations of the experience of being human in Europe and America.  It tells a story of fantastic spiritual appetites and their frustration, and charts the outcomes of successive Faustian leaps at the unconditioned.  Such a project is limited by the selection of texts and perhaps by the classic dilemmas of psycho-historical method.  But one need not posit a real collective psyche out there, as Jung and so many others have done, to read a syntax in a series of texts.  And whenever one does that, processes will appear in the data, processes like breaking and blending.  There need not be one great mind undergoing these processes, for the processes themselves to be occurring; history is a wave phenomenon, with no particular protagonist.

Starting with a look at the religious confrontation with textuality in Thomas More and William Tyndale and with infinity in Giordano Bruno, part one moves through a study of humanity’s epistemic limitations in Shakespeare and Luther.  The texts of part one show a hermeneutic iconoclasm reminiscent of the mass destruction of Catholic statuary across Europe and England in the 16th Century described by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars. In part two, from Keats to Dylan Thomas, the texts are on the defensive, not the insurgent, phase of their metabolism: the struggle is not against limitation anymore, but against the scarcity that rushed in as the vessels were smashed and all they had held (ontological confidence, unity with nature, independence from language, the hoped-for transparency of texts, of faces – in short, the intelligibility of the world and one’s own place in it) spilled out to mingle among the fragments of the old containers.

In the essay on wasted foreknowledge in Julius Caesar, the repressed is the warning offered by the oracles and soothsayers; more than that, it is the knowledge that our own political existence is the captive of ideology in much the same way that the characters are captives of the plot, whom not even an oracular glimpse at further pages can save.  In the Milton chapter, the repressed is, again, manifold: it includes atheism, the annihilationist Mortalism that Milton could not tolerate, and the unbearable insight that the premises of monotheism and those of republicanism in Paradise Lost are utterly at odds.

The relationship between repression and scarcity is articulated in Keats’ response to Milton. The younger poet’s  two sonnets “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” and “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be,” are read as gazes outward toward an epistemic horizon, where Ahab pursues his leviathan in the next chapter.  After a look at  Rilke’s forlorn cosmopolitanism, the chapters on 20th Century poets confront the gorgeous wreckage of the Romantic movement in what looks like the midlife of the world.