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

rearranging and reconnecting is hypothesized to be the constant job
of the default network when it is not required to a end to externally
imposed tasks. This kind of unconstrained processing might turn out
to be the area in which new connections and revised categorizations
are produced. Perhaps the artist who turns to the pastoral genre rec-
ognizes that at least for a short while the genre affords the state of re-
laxation that can be not only restorative but creative as well – the lit-
erary equivalent, perhaps, of the default mode as the time and space
to think, connect, repair. Might then a work of art be, or evoke, or take
advantage of, this default state?
Another possibly relevant area of current cognitive research in-
vestigates how judgments of reliability are made. How does the brain,
working to se le into a satisfactory representation, decide that a cate-
gorization or configuration is good enough to act upon? And how is
this related to the question of how the brain judges the reliability of a
complex representation? Is this activity different from basic (or en-
hanced?) categorization, that is, deciding how to judge and deal with
a text or any part of it as fiction or non-fiction? As offensive? Boring?
There is plenty of work to be done, furthermore, in aligning the hy-
potheses of brain-imaging studies and the concepts and vocabularies
of literary and art historians, as I have done here, suggesting that the
predictive processing hypothesis supports my claim that archetypes
recur because they haven’t been satisfactorily resolved. Might there,
then, still be a role for the pastoral genre? Can it be fruitfully reused?

Jennifer Haley’s The Nether

A recent and surprising recurrence of pastoral appears in a play writ-
ten by the American playwright, Jennifer Haley. The Nether (2013) dis-
plays the enduring conflict between pleasure and law explicitly. Is the
internet, it asks, an acceptable locus amoenus? An intimate place of de-
light? In The Nether, the pastoral reappears within a story concerned
with one of the most painful topics in the social context of the play’s
composition, and one that seems far from its Greek origins, namely
pedophilia and internet child pornography. Haley is again asking
what pleasures are or should be legitimate, legal, and whether there

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