Page 200 - Costellazioni 5

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

Iris, in Fig. 2, are enjoying a typical pastoral pleasure; they are having
a picnic.
As the predictive processing hypothesis would describe the cog-
nitive work of audiences, those who recognize the artistic genre can im-
mediately begin cooperating, reopening, within the pleasurable visual
world, the old questions of the power and legitimacy of fantasy. And, as
the hypothesis also tells us, their past experience will be inadequate. But
don’t forget, they have also already activated the ligaments of the genre
of police drama. Just as the Renaissance pastorals regularly involved
masks or genre-reversing disguises that provide additional freedoms
and/ or transgressions, here too, it eventually becomes clear that each of
the major characters is able to hide duplicitously in the alternative reality
of the Nether. Analogous to the computer game-player who chooses and
temporarily becomes an online avatar, not only Sims and Doyle, but also
the police investigator (him or herself), it turns out, leads and is hiding
an alternate online life. What’s more, each of the characters’ own past
within a parent-child relationship is relevant. The plot becomes intricate
in ways we needn’t follow, but I have introduced it here to show that the
power of the pastoral contract is still accessible in a renewed combina-
tion. I would claim, further, that it is precisely the pastoral that is needed
– no other genre would do – because the issue is whether the imagina-
tion, in this case evoked not by poem, painting, or stage drama, but via
internet child pornography, can provide a cure – a pastoral cure. And if
the answer is yes, should the internet activity of a pedophile be encour-
aged rather than forbidden? Should it be understood to be a licit pleas-
ure? On stage, the argument is put into the mouth of Sims, early on:

Look, Detective, I am sick. I am sick and have always been sick and there is
no cure. No amount of cognitive behavioral therapy or relapse determent
or even chemical castration will sway me from my urges toward children. I
am sick and no ma er how much I loved him or her I would make my own
child sick and I see this, I see this – not all of us see this – but I have been
cursed with both compulsion and insight. I have taken responsibility for my
sickness. I am protecting my neighbor’s children and my brother’s children
and the children I won’t allow myself to have, and the only way I can do
this is because I’ve created a place where I can be my fucking self! (19).

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