Lucchesi and The Whale

Lentricchia Frank Lentricchia

Description

Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life-because grief alone inspires him to write-and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of "stories full of violence in a poetic style," Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches "only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable" and to "never forget that." Austerely isolated, anxiety-ridden, and relentlessly self-involved, Lucchesi nonetheless cannot completely squelch his eagerness for love.Having become "a mad Ahab of reading," who is driven to dissect the "artificial body of Melville's behemothian book" to grasp its truth, Lucchesi allows his thoughts to wander and loop from theory to dream to reality to questionable memory. But his black humor-tinged musings are often as profoundly moving as they are intellectual, such as the section in which he ponders the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the significance of a name-and then attempts to share these thoughts with a sexy, middle-aged flight attendant-or another in which he describes a chance meeting with a similarly-named mafia don.Despite apparent spiritual emptiness, Lucchesi in the end does find "a secret meaning" to Moby-Dick. And Lentricchia's creations-both Lucchesi and The Whale and its main character-reveal this meaning through a series of ingeniously self-reflective metaphors, in much the way that Melville himself did in and through Moby-Dick. Vivid, humorous, and of unparalleled originality, this new work from Frank Lentricchia will inspire and console all who love and ponder both great literature and those who would write it.

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380498
• Langue: English

Extrait

FROM REVIEWS OF LENTRICCHIA’S PREVIOUS BOOKS

Praise forJohnny CritelliandThe Knifemen

“Memory is the secret protagonist of these twin novels by Frank Lentricchia where he strips naked the minds and bodies of two men besieged by their remote past. Memory that glows and re- deems in one; and memory that stabs and destroys in the other. But always memory trapped in a language so lyrical, vernacular, and violent that it tests the limits of our endurance, and demands that we question our conventions.”—Ariel Dorfman

“These novellas announce the emergence of a major voice in con- temporary literature.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“What they dredge up is somber or funny or lose-your-lunch ugly. The sabotage and sadness are real, and the language out of the streets and kitchens and bedrooms is obscenely authentic.”—En- tertainment Weekly

“Original and lively . . . Frank Lentricchia is that rare thing, a professor of English with writing talent.”—Frank Kermode

Praise forThe Edge of Night

“Electric with ideas and feelings . . . [Lentricchia is] an Italian tenor, pouring his beautiful vulnerability all over the room, and then daring us to pity him, or to call him a wimp for wearing a doublet and tights. He may not have solved the riddle of himself, but he knows how to sing.”—The New Yorker

“Frank Lentricchia, justly known for his intellect, here plunges into the personal—and dazzles us with a cascade of memories, fantasies, agonies and chuckles. A moving testament of contem- porary confusion and hopes.”—Stanley Kauffman

“Brutal and uncompromising, brilliant and desperate, this is visionary autobiography on a dare, a fevered exploration of one man’s life—intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, physical—as a man.”—Anthony DeCurtis,Rolling Stone

Praise forThe Music of the Inferno

“The novel as a form still lives in our culture because it continues to be the deepest and most rewarding guide to the mystery of people’s souls, and this brave and honest novel serves precisely that standard.”—Don DeLillo, author ofUnderworld

“This unmetaphorical tour of the underworld plunges into the deep history and foundational crimes of the little city of Utica, New York. It is Lentricchia’s most ambitious narrative to date, a confrontation with class and race which also offers the pleasures of magnificent sentences, loathsome objects and events, and gro- tesque as well as enigmatic characters.The Music of the Inferno does the historical novel in a new way, and that is no mean feat.” —Fredric Jameson

“Lentricchia’s novel frames the American experience in ways that, for me, were revelatory. It is a brilliant piece of fiction, able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best writing in America to- day.”—Jay Parini, author ofBenjamin’s Crossing

Lucchesi and The Whale

Post-Contemporary

Interventions

Series Editors

Stanley Fish and

Fredric Jameson

Lucchesi

and The Whale

by Frank Lentricchia

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2001

© 2001 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Officina Serif by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

This book is for Jody McAuliffe

With very special thanks to the courageous playwright, Marlane Meyer

Acknowledgments

Some of my pages were inspired by Salvador Dali’sThe Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus;several letters of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; Don DeLillo’sWhite Noise;Franco Moretti’sModern Epic; Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein; the Derek Jarman script and film,Wittgenstein;and Charles Feidelson’s annotated edition ofMoby-Dick.Portions of this book appeared in theLondon Re- view of Books(12 November 1998 and 1 April 1999).