Abstract

Reading Vaught’s book is rather like being captivated on a train with a detective novel left by a previous passenger: one reads along with delight, juggling clues and suspicions, only to find that the last forty-seven pages are missing. The four chapters cover Moby Dick; Old Testament patriarchs from Abraham to Moses; Plato’s Euthyphro; critique of Hegel’s attempts to accommodate Wholeness under a Complete System, transcending openness and pictorial language. The first three chapters offer much delightful and evocative reading. But the book’s most crucial terms—fragmentation, wholeness, completeness, and directionality—are initially unclear and not duly demystified by the end. The effect is occasionally reminiscent of some easier passages in Joyce’s Ulysses, where the reader or rider jogs happily along, only to be thrown by a word from a seemingly private language.