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

which itself allows breaking away from established pa erns, trying
out new ones. Here, then, is a rewrite of the hypothesis in terms suit-
able to literary study: every correction the body makes in order to
match up whatever past experience has come forward to deal with
the present, offers a new pa ern, that is, a new or revised abstraction
as part of an ongoing negotiation, an exploration of the question of
how much of the past is useful. How li le do I need from memory to
move on with something new? Whatever representation works is
good enough as a temporary resting (or testing) place, a useful com-
promise, an accomplishment of the brain, that will itself be stored and
elaborated further.
The challenge for cognitive literary scholars as they hypothesize
the different ways in which people connect stored information and
pa erns of imagery to the novel representations they encounter is to
recognize evidence of usable disruption. As being hungry doesn’t
guarantee the availability of healthy food, so it isn’t the case that we
automatically make useful intelligence out of fiction. That we even do
so reliably is doubtful, though it seems that growing children are usu-
ally guided in their learning of the social contracts that produce satis-
faction from fictions within their local cultural world. A set of contracts
of fictional genres – both the forms of works of the imagination and
also their functional genres - enable the distinguishing, for example,
of tragedies from comedies. A culture’s functional genres, learned in
context, will, on this model, suggest meaningful category distinctions,
but individual artists and audiences remain free to decide which cat-
egorization satisfies best in current circumstances.

Other cognitive areas of investigation and possible connections

Further research may eventually connect the predictive processing hy-
pothesis to what has been called the default mode of brain function,
and both to a literary theoretical perspective. We’d again be looking
for functional interruption. Imaging studies have shown that brains
spend as much time as they can, when not interrupted, precisely on
the task of patching and connecting; on the task of building advanta-
geous networks among what’s already in there and what’s new. This

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