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

of information from interconnected areas come together according to
the need signaled by error messages. And here’s where the analogy
to philosophical skepticism appears: success is not measured by ac-
curate representation, but by the affordance of effective action. The
overall picture of a brain as an embodied biological agent that acts
fast, looping among old pa erns and new information, making
minute adjustments until a satisfactory fit between interpretation and
action is found is not far from experienced readers’ sense of how we
understand texts as they unfold. Because the process of adjusting past
and present starts from a new, unplanned, and arbitrary set of cir-
cumstances, and continues only until a satisfactory, a good enough sit-
uation appears, indeterminacy, imperfection, and risk are built-ins,
as with other aspects of evolution, such as the origins of change in
random mutation. The processes seem, at least so far, to be keeping
the species alive.
Granting a central position to mismatches and surprise, the pre-
dictive processing hypothesis offers just the space cognitive literary
theory has been hoping to find within which we can locate the work
of fictions and works of imagination in all media. “Perception,” on
this view, in Clark’s words “at least, as it occurs in creatures like us –
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is co-emergent with something functionally akin to imagination.” It
deals opportunistically with just what our best artists supply – the
unexpected. On this hypothesis, visual images and narratives, songs
and statues, moving pictures or modern dances, as they arrive from
unpredictable and unstable combinations of material and imagined
sources, cannot, prima facie, be detached from the body’s ongoing
work of homeostasis for survival and flourishing. Not only do fictions
not corrupt the cognitive system, as has in some quarters been sup-
posed, but the distinction between works of imagination and any
other unfamiliar stimulus is minimized as well, both categories hav-
ing the potential to be disruptive and also informative. Surprise gen-
erates adaptation, and surprise, in fiction, can be produced by play,

14 Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 94.

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