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

The author of The Nether seems to want us to agree (or maybe just con-
sider agreeing) that imagination as provoked by internet images just
as by any other art medium is not only not dangerous, but can even
provide a healing environment. We are enchanted by the green world
even as we are still trying to work out just how the rape, sodomy and
murder the police inspector has referred to early on are realized, be-
fore, that is, we actually recognize that the crimes named will all be
part of the hyperreal, and that the illness that needs the pastoral cure
here is pedophilia. We agree to what seems like the innocent pleasure
of the green world well before we see the lovely li le girl lift her dress,
or hear her offering an axe. The author has entrapped us, indeed, by
a prediction error, as Aminta was trapped by agreeing to spy on Silvia
in her bath, while we are still in the presence of the happy, the comic
version of pastoral. But in this play, the focus switches toward the con-
fusions between reality and life in the netherworld of internet fantasy
at a time at which technology has advanced to permit the characters
at the imaginary Hideaway both a growing awareness of their double
life and also to permit users, if they wish, the ability to check out, as it
were, of one’s actual world and decide to live permanently in the
nether. Is it this easy to subvert the law?
For all its artificiality, the pastoral genre has repeatedly asked its
audiences to imagine what it might be like to live, like Robin Hood and
his merry men, outside the law. Describing the cultural history of the
mid-sixteenth century during which the Italian pastoral plays emerged,
Sampson forefronts the old controversy raised anew by the Council of
Trent (1545-63) about whether poetry must teach as well as delight. She
cites Ba ista Guarini’s recognition that although the Biblical patriarchs,
from Adam through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, lived a pastoral exis-
tence, the ideal republic was only achieved after Moses received and
17
instituted the law. The genre most successfully recreates a discussion
of its serious issues when its audiences have earlier experience with
the genre; then it affords the rethinking of representationally hungry
issues. The motor of the genre is the same as the motor of the toggle

17 Ibid., 146.

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