The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Lucchesi and The Whale by Frank LentricchiaT.J. Gerlach
Frank Lentricchia. Lucchesi and The Whale. Duke Univ. Press, 2001. 115 pp. $17.95.
The belly of Frank Lentricchia’s Lucchesi and The Whale is a thirty-five-page meditation on Moby-Dick. Surrounding this are several brief scenarios in the life, career, and fantasies of one Thomas Lucchesi—”relentless reader and rumored writer.” While these other chapters (which tend toward the metafictional and the metaphysical) have their moments, they are far less inspired than the central section on Melville. This chapter, “Chasing Melville,” takes as its starting point the fact that while the title of Melville’s novel is “Moby HYPHEN Dick,” the name of the whale in it is actually “Moby UNHYPHEN Dick.” From this seemingly minute point, Lucchesi weaves a wonderful reading not only of Moby-Dick and Melville, but also of fathers and sons, writers and writing, texts, the universe, death. Occurring in a book that positions itself as fiction takes the pressure off the need for any of these ideas to be “true.” But it needn’t. As Roland Barthes so aptly showed, criticism may be personal, quirky, creative, and eccentric and feel no less true for all that. What criticism is, at its best, is the joy at the heart of all reading—an agile mind interacting with a text that helps to inspire that agility. Lucchessi’s take on Moby-Dick may be profound revelation or deconstructionist over-reading, but it is most definitely a pleasure. [T. J. Gerlach]