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

ception, the happy endings always result from a sudden recognition by
means of a timely coincidence. Sadness is turned to joy, but, Cave points
to the price paid: “the commonly accepted coordinates of knowledge
13
have gone awry.” Throughout the story, readers have been trying to
figure out what needs to be learned or understood, and wondering how
the characters in the story will come to understand what they need to
know. Then someone comes in with a token: a ring, a royal garment,
gold coins, a scroll with an oracle wri en on it. These objects speak, and
what they say, according to Cave, is the special message of the pastoral:
forget figuring things out – your ratiocination is unnecessary. We are
all in the hands of the gods who order the world, which is just as well,
since we are apparently ill-equipped to understand it. This is a deeply
skeptical message. And as Cave was the first to notice, it is also a cogni-
tive message, an epistemology rejecting itself. It plays right into the pas-
toral loop: your brain helps you see that it’s less help than you thought.

But not quite: trying again to get it right via the predictive processing
hypothesis

As if I were myself composing a pastoral – should this essay be printed
in green ink? – I turn now to an emerging cognitive hypothesis that
allows us to accept the uncertainty of our human capacities for under-
standing, as Cave did, without the tragic implications. I now introduce
the predictive processing hypothesis because it allows us to frame our
agile ability to toggle between concrete and abstract within a descrip-
tion of the larger process by which the cognizer moves incrementally
toward greater security and satisfaction. The hypothesis is a ractive
to literary historians because it fits with our sense that genres have
both stability and flexibility. As I have argued elsewhere, artists’ in-
tentions and audiences’ judgments about genres interact adaptively
with their contexts. But the predictive processing hypothesis makes a
further advance in displaying how it is that although our brains in-

13 Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 488.

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