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Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral

Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

ELLEN SPOLSKY

Bar-Ilan University

Abstract

The pastoral genre, in poetry, plays, and paintings, describes and praises an
escape to the countryside. The departure from the city or the court to an imag-
ined place of calm and harmony is portrayed as a retreat from conflict and
from thinking, and a return to a primitive and peaceful life of the senses. But
as soon as the court or city dwellers have relocated, the genre almost imme-
diately turns to a discussion of abstract, usually moralizing, truths that reflect
their intellectual sophistication. The pastoral provides cognitive literary his-
torians a clear example of how the genre cooperates with and enacts the most
basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the common, everyday ability
to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. Ge ing away from
thinking, it turns out, gives you important things to think about. This essay
discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggests that it offers a
usefully revisionary way of discussing genres and archetypes. Examples from
Tasso’s Aminta, (c. 1573), Marvell’s, “The Garden,” (c. 1650), and Jennifer
Haley’s The Nether (2013) exemplify both the artists’ and the audiences’
cognitive flexibility, and the a empts to solve representationally hungry prob-
lems by re-representing them.

Keywords: genre; archive; pastoral; Aminta; “The Garden”; The Nether;
cognitive cultural history; predictive processing hypothesis.