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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

– even uneducated ones – toggle between sense data and abstraction.
The artist lures audiences into the beauty and ease of the garden but
once there, cannot prevent their a ention (or his own) from bouncing
back to a moral for the story, namely (for example) the importance of
licit and unselfish love as the basis for sexual union, or the vanity of
striving for material rewards or honor. Shakespeare is explicitly ironic
about this duplicity. His most famous rural moralist is Jaques, in As
You Like It, who is “full of ma er,” producing “a thousand similes”
to “moralize the spectacle,” for example, of exiled courtiers killing
deer on the animals’ own home turf. (II.i)

Cognitive Fluidity

And I’ll do it myself, right here. I take the imagery of pastorals as a
basis from which to explore the idea of recurrence with variation
found within all literary genres, as their specific features appear and
reappear in different times and places. Since Northrop Frye’s descrip-
tion of archetypes (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957), the recurrence of
schemata or image clusters has been understood as evidence for their
foundational truth. As I have argued elsewhere (Spolsky, 2001, 2017),
however, the recurrence indicates just the opposite. The repeated dis-
play of the conflict in pastoral poems, plays, and pictures between
sense data and the mind’s ability to produce abstractions is evidence
that the issue has not been sufficiently clarified; that the cluster of im-
ages and ideas the genre compacts remains tangled because there is
at its center an unsolved problem, a problem that is representationally
hungry, maybe even beyond our evolved capacity to represent coher-
ently and satisfactorily. Andy Clark and Josefa Toribio first introduced
6
the term of “representation-hungry problems.” I first used the idea
of representational hunger as a driver of cultural production in my
study of religious imagery and iconoclasm. Clark notes that some

6 Clark and Toribio. “Doing without Representing?,” Synthese 101 (1994): 401-
31, p. 426.

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