Knight's Reading List XXII: October 2008

Reading List:

Highsmith, Patricia. Ripley Under Ground.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. Elementary Logic, revised edition.
Vidal, Gore. Burr.

Non-Fiction:

Quine, Willard Van Orman. Elementary Logic, revised edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1980. xii + 129 pages. Index.

After reading Mark Zegarelli’s book Logic for Dummies (see my reading list for September 2008), I got out some of my other books on logic, some of which I had read and some of which I had not. The first one I finished was Elementary Logic, by the dean of American formal logic, Willard Van Orman Quine of Harvard. This is the revised edition of a book first published in 1941. By Quine’s own account he had made some significant changes in the book through the various editions.

Elementary Logic consists of 48 short chapters in four sections. The first section lays out the structure of statements, uses of the inclusive “or”, the equivalence of “but,” “although,” and “unless” to “and,” and so on, with particular attention to transposing ordinary language into the unambiguous notation of formal logic. The second section deals with “transformations,” that is, the technique of turning a statement in one form into another, thus opening it up to different techniques of proof. The final two sections are on quantification and the techniques of inference appropriate to quantified statements.

The brevity of this book, along with the word “elementary” in the title, might lead one to underestimate its power and difficulty. This is very dense stuff, and each chapter builds on the previous material, so that the cumulative effect is very powerful. For the same reason, failure to master points in the early sections will leave one helpless before the more technically difficult material in the later parts of the book.

Fiction:

Highsmith, Patricia. Ripley Under Ground. 1970. 298 pages

One might think that the only way one could appeal to the emotions of a reader would be through the corresponding emotions of a character. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels present us with an anti-hero, whose emotions are opaque and inaccessible. Tom Ripley tends to be reactive, not proactive, and his actions are completely ungoverned by social or moral norms. He seems a shallow, pleasant, vaguely artistic sort, living the good life at his chateau in France. If threatened, however, Ripley will lie, defraud, or kill, and his concerns are entirely technical. The police are often suspicious of Ripley, but he slips through their fingers, largely because he has none of Raskolnikov’s urge to confess.

In Ripley Under Ground, which I believe to be the second in the series, following The Talented Mr. Ripley, a long-running fraud in which Ripley and his accomplices have been profiting from the popularity of the works of a dead artist, is threatened with exposure because of an American art amateur with a theory about the artist’s use of color. The American is threatening to expose many of the paintings as forgeries, and the forger is starting to break under the pressure. On top of that, a young cousin of Dickie Greenleaf, a boy Tom killed and impersonated in the past, pays Tom a visit. Will Tom have to dispose of him, too?

Vidal, Gore. Burr. New York: Vintage International, 1973. 430 pages.

Gore Vidal is not a likable person. I saw him on television the other day, frail and confined to a wheelchair, and just as waspish as ever. Vidal is, however, a very fine writer. One of his most ambitious projects (and we may never know if this was conceived as a project, or if it just grew) is the American Chronicle Series. This consists of seven historical novels: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and The Golden Age. If Lincoln and Burr are reliable indicators, these novels may be a better introduction to American history than your average academic history text.

Burr is centered on Aaron Burr, our country’s third Vice President and the killer of Alexander Hamilton, who has returned to New York and the practice of law in his old age. The novel is set in the years 1833-1836, from Burr’s marriage at the age of 77 to Eliza Jumel, until his death. (There is a brief postscript in 1840 to wrap up a matter concerning the narrator.) There is a nice interplay between the current political scene, in which Martin van Buren is preparing to succeed Andrew Jackson in the White House, and the days of the Revolution, to which Burr often returns in memory. Along the way we have character sketches, and sometimes fuller portraits, of Hamilton, George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Washington Irving, and the other founders of our country, all in Burr/Vidal’s particularly sardonic tones. Of particular interest is Burr’s view of Jefferson, who tried to have Burr judicially murdered on two occasions. Vidal’s portrait of Jefferson is not flattering, but it is consistent with other sources.

This is an excellent novel and well worth reading. An interest in, if not some background of American history, would be helpful in sorting out all the names and characters.