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In his new book, Mihai Spariosu offers a positive alternative to the mentality of power he has so carefully scrutinized in his previous works. As the book's subtitle suggests, The Wreath of Wild Olive is about games and the consequences of games. How and why do we compete, and how do we esteem our victors? More to the point, can the spirit of play transcend our culture of competition, as when Zeus, by awarding Olympian champions with a crown of wild olive, "transfigures the competitive values of his worshipers and points, through a paradox, to an incommensurable, alternative world in which all contest becomes cooperation, all war becomes peace?" For Spariosu, criticism should indulge the "ludic-irenic perspective" that literature presents. Literature can have a salutary effect on culture at large by virtue of its connection with the ethos of a community. As Spariosu argues, "by playfully staging a real or an imaginary world and presenting it from various perspectives, literature contributes to a certain community and hence can assume an important role in bringing about historical change." Literature is inextricably linked with a community's "ethopathology," which is composed of ethos, or holistic "thought-behavior," and pathology, which Spariosu construes as "the psychoemotional investment or interest that both underlies and upholds its values, whether material or spiritual." Instead of viewing literature as wholly determined by a given mentality (or historical moment, class struggle, or group interest), Spariosu sees literature as capable of detaching thought and action from a given ethopathology to construct alternative worlds and mentalities.
The work opens with a reading of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, moving on to a genealogy of conceptions of liminality in critical tradition. Spariosu then provides readings of such authors as Dostoevsky, Eliade, Devi, Nabokov, and Lowry. The work closes with reflections on Ruskin and Arnold. The author shows that these critics, while living in the dysfunctional society of work and wealth, pointed the way to a criticism capable of articulating and enacting an ethopathology that heals society.
Like Nietszche, Schopenhauer upholds the connection between the ascetic ideal and the mentality of power. However, Schopenhauer, in a highly qualified manner, suggests an alternative to that mentality in mystical experience. While Schopenhauer resigns himself to the possibility that mystics "cannot convince," Spariosu locates in literary liminality the possibility of a persuasive "mystical" attitude towards the void that manifests itself in the construction of alternative worlds that seem "incommensurable" with a world governed by a mentality of power. In a crucial passage, Spariosu argues that it is the apparent incommunicability of alternative mentalities within the frame of a discourse produced by the ethopathology of power that prevents communities from entertaining the plausibility of irenic worlds. As Schopenhauer notes, the existence of a non-violent, harmonious world is philosophically (and historically) incommunicable. We cannot demonstrate the existence of worlds outside those based on a mentality of power because this mentality is all we know.
Certain critics will be disturbed by Spariosu's solution to this dilemma. For Spariosu, adopting the "as if" mode of staging and play, in which "we may proceed as if something (authentic irenic worlds, for example) were known outside our world of power... would mean gradually moving away from or turning our back on [the worlds we live in]." This notion of turning one's back on a given social structure, of renouncing polemics that nurture the agonistic world in which we live, will certainly strike theoreticians of engaged criticism as a kind of heresy. The idea that it is the hermeneutic circle (or even the scientific method) that mires Western culture in a competitive, hierarchical mode of being, will strike some, perhaps, as a manifestation of a higher superstition.
Attentive to literary history's perennial claim that literature functions as a mediating space, standing self-consciously outside the discourses of science, philosophy, and history, Spariosu constructs a genealogy of liminality that encompasses Gorgias, Sidney, Schiller, Shelley, Jean-Paul Sartre and contemporary thinkers such as Mazzotta, Nemoianu, Iser, and Pérez-Firmat. What Spariosu shows is that throughout this tradition, literary liminality has been defined as "marginality (either supportive-corrective, or subversive), mediating neutrality, and self-transcending plasticity." Spariosu clearly tends toward the final definition, seeing the first two as perpetuating a Platonic (and agonistic) notion of Being.
The Wreath of Wild Olive can be taken as Spariosu's response to the experience of exile common to expatriates of the Eastern bloc. This experience includes the incisive view of the Janus-faced will to power, of the competitive and destructive spirit that replicates itself even in those once "alternative communities" that reinforce the Will to Power through a collective "joyful forgetfulness" of its mechanisms. Inherent to this approach is a critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which, Spariosu suggests, uncover again and again the banality of power, extending power's reach by insisting on its omnipresence, and by glorifying the critic who reinforces the agonistic nature of the critical endeavor. The Wreath of Wild Olive is, of course, a polemical work, which constitutes a paradox that will surely not escape the astute reader. However, Spariosu asks the reader to suspend, for a few hours, that kind of tautological thought, to entertain the possibility that criticism might be understood within a different frame of reference, and that the book might indeed map the contours of an alternative irenic criticism.
Andrew Brown
University of Georgia at Athens