Artist and Scholar1

Book Review by Constantin Virgil Negoiţă*

(Origini/Romanian Roots, May-June, 2002)

Not long ago the divide between artist and scientist seemed impossible to cross. From Pascal, who remarked on the difference between l’esprit de finesse and l’esprit de la geometrie, to Borges, who crossed this border elegantly, the writer and the researcher seemed completely different human beings. One was writing books while the other took care of them.
Mirela Roznoveanu, novelist, poet, audacious literary critic and journalist, shows that times have changed. In a book addressed to law practitioners that need legal information located in virtual libraries and databases connected to the Internet, Mirela Roznoveanu has the courage to innovate.  She presents the process of legal research in the vast network of the modern world as a journey and a fairy tale. She introduces the dimension of time where there was none.
A manual, a treatise, a guide, as well as a scientific theory, a virtual catalog, a yellow book, and a picture are all together passive images. They do not tell a story.
Mirela’s book is a surprise.
First of all, it is written in a language the author acquired relatively late in life. This fact alone can amaze us. How many people coming to America with no knowledge of English write a book designed to teach others what to do in a field after only a few years? And how many artists succeed in making their art participate in a textbook’s standards? Therein lies the most powerful achievement of this book. The work is not only a textbook, but also a fascinating piece of reportage. It is alive like a movie, not a static picture. The author recounts how she has discovered and manipulated near-miraculous techniques and how she has managed to cooperate with her students. I call this achievement a post-modern literary feat of the first order.
Culturally sophisticated, Mirela Roznoveanu knows what’s going on in the world and she skillfully binds things together.  Here is a telling example. In the classification activity (the essential tool in locating items within the holdings of any established modern library), binary logic does not function very well. A book, an article, any text does not belong to only one class/subject heading but to several, in varying degrees. Classification prefers “fuzzy logic.” The poet fully recommends that lawyers apply this logic more befitting saints – as I have described it in my book, Fuzzy Sets.
On page 163 the author states: “History shows that any discovery has always had creative and destructive aspects, derived, I believe, from the binary structure of the universe. The latter is in its turn reflected in humanity’s perpetual ambivalence: mortals are continuously striving to decide their place in the eternal conflict between good and evil. But in the fuzzy logic of the cyberlegal world, which allows for no crisp borders, which side of the conflict you choose is decided by the degrees of your positive or negative attitudes. For my part, I have always striven to be on the side of the angels.”
When I first met Miss Roznoveanu in New York, she was attending English classes as well as a graduate school where she was exploring the mysterious field of cyberlibraries.  Cyber means built upon computers. Cyberculture involves having learned to make use of the advantages of fuzzy logic, and today Mirela Roznoveanu teaches those who dispense justice in the world how to get informed, where to go to learn about the law, and what is the logic of evaluating legal resources. I was thinking of these issues while reading a text published in Commentary (February 2002) on how historian Gertrude Himmelfarb assessed the work of Richard Posner, a great intellectual and a judge at one of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. He is also a professor at the School of Law of the University of Chicago. In his recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, he discusses morality, focusing on value judgments, which he says depend upon evaluations that cannot be demonstrated as being either true or false. I am sure that Posner would appreciate this postmodern textbook and essay in one, written by Mirela Roznoveanu who works at one of the most important law schools in the country, the New York University School of Law.
I am not very sure that Romanian intellectuals so active in Romanian media –  who are happy and glad to write exclusively about a marginal group,  a very small and carefully self-selected and proclaimed one to be representative of the Romanian Americans – would discuss this book. The Romanian Americans are very diverse, and they are not only “left-handed” but also “right-handed” (as Virgil Nemoianu pointed out a couple of years ago in an article published in the Bucharest-based review 22).
Many academies and foundations – like the soldier still fighting WW II   because he did not hear about the end of modern logic decided by binary logic – continue to be blinded by this “shiny” prolific group, very clumsy and noisy, self-centered and unrepentant, even when it switches from plaintiff to defendant. (Because they like diversion, the group started to oxidize. I affirm this after reading Robert Scholes, Professor at Brown University, who in an article “The Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce” shows the relationship between prostitution and modernism. The demonstration is done using the superb example of Les Mademoiselles of Avignon  and the extraordinary Ulysses, studying the other face of this relationship: the modern artist that prostitutes himself  because  when the brothel entered modern art in order to create masterpieces, art entered the brothel too in order to bring about subversion.)
Mirela Roznoveanu’s book deserves to get a magna cum laude commendation.
I hope that the Romanian-American Academy or the Romanian Cultural Foundation or someone else interested in the ties of the native Romanians and the ones living in exile will start to recognize the real authors, the cultural personalities that cannot be corroded by time.

*Constantin Virgil Negoita is a professor at Hunter College, the Department of Computer Science, where he teaches Computer Logic, Fuzzy Sets and Systems.

[1] Mirela Roznovschi, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture, Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, N.Y., 2001, second edition 2002.  http://www.transnationalpubs.com