photo by Les Todd / illustration by Maxine Mills

dorning the walls of his East Campus office are three paintings from the Duke art museum's permanent collection. One, a somber, disfigured nude in dark hues, was painted by a Duke art student in the late Sixties, shortly before his suicide. This is the favorite, the one he asked for; the other two were there already when he moved in 1993 from his earlier perch in the Allen Building. The room is adorned in mahogany, with a large desk, two walls of bookshelves, and a small, round table with chairs that barely reveal their institutional heritage. There is no computer, not even a typewriter--just yellow legal pads and a can of pencils. The office corner frames a poster advertising Ezra Pound's 1931 pamphlet "How to Read," with those three contentious words emblazoned on yellowing leaves in 40-point type.

This is the office of Thomas Lucchesi, professor of American literature, writer of letters, visitor of moribund friends. A man who teaches college "only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable," and who works tirelessly, if not productively, on some "experimental novel." A man who can deal more aptly with art than with life. A man whose passion to create can, time and again, isolate him and saddle him with anxiety. A self-fashioned "mad Ahab of reading," who searches desperately, in heartfelt scholarly prose, for the meaning within Melville's Moby-Dick. A man who sometimes sees his world through the prism of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. But above all, a man whose love for life, for his intimates, and himself, endures.

In The Aftermath of Tragedy

In reality, it is the office of Frank Lentricchia A.M. '63, Ph.D. '66, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of literature, celebrated critic, novelist, master teacher, lover of high modernist poetry, and creator of Thomas Lucchesi. His work, especially a critical trilogy in the 1980s, has inspired many a fierce devotee of its own. In an angry testimonial published in 1996 he famously disavowed his status as a pre-eminent literary critic--and the entire notion of politically based, politically biased, politically correct scholarship, which he has been charged with inventing. Finally, he has turned to "close reading" and fiction writing as outlets for the literary passion he refused to let the academy contain.

Lucchesi is the hero of Lentricchia's Lucchesi and The Whale (the "The," in reference to Melville's creation, takes its capital on purpose), published last year by Duke University Press. And for its author, Lucchesi "is an outgrowth of a preoccupation with the cost of shutting yourself down in order to practice total devotion to your work."

Lucchesi began with a few literary sketches culled from the author's dreams, and grew from there into a lyric fiction. Through it all, the awake Lentricchia was dealing with the baggage of a semester of Melville's Moby-Dick, during which "the book suddenly loomed before me as unteachable." Channeling frustration into inspiration, he says he began to think "this obsession with Melville would give some coherence to the various fragments of narrative that I had just put together. Inevitably, I came to the point where I realized that my character had to confront Moby-Dick, and that became the central drama of the book." He describes it finally as "the kind of narrative that sits on the border between realism and fantasy."

An opera in four acts, the book opens with two sequences of dreams culled from the author's nightly travels, everything from a family of cannibalistic snakes to an evening at La Scala, where Lucchesi-the-writer is called to replace Pavarotti-the-singer. A comic interlude titled "Writer in Residence" separates these earlier forays from the following meat of the book, which is a critical reflection in the form of an obsessive monologue on Melville's Moby-Dick. In a few hundred words, Lucchesi is dismissed from his post at Central College at the behest of the dean and a certain "President Jan" who find his pedagogy, which consists of "repeated and strenuous exercise in deep aesthetic immersion," risible.

"Chasing Melville," an animated spell of light-hearted criticism in Lucchesi's thinly disguised Lentricchian voice, takes up the central question of hyphenation. Moby-Dick is the totality, the aesthetic universe, in which Moby Dick, The Whale, resides. "It definitely stems from the terrible experience that I had with Melville in the classroom, not that any of it came out that well at the time," says Lentricchia. Lucchesi concludes with a meditation on "Sex and Wittgenstein," wherein the bookish professor woos an Alitalia flight attendant into midair lovemaking with his dazzling explications of philosophical nuance.

Lucchesi plays with the boundaries of book form, with the "structurality of the structure," to use some of the very parlance Lentricchia coined in his earlier incarnation as a literary theorist. To understand his playful irreverence toward established conventions and forms, one must go back a bit, to his revolutionary 1980s. Back then, when his mustache was full, Lentricchia used to anger and inspire in equal and vehement numbers. And to understand this polemical face of Frank Lentricchia, one must then go back even further, to his days at Duke as a graduate student under Professor Bernard Duffey.

In the old Duke English department, Lentricchia penned a historical master's thesis on the American reception of the poet Byron, which gave rise to his first published essay. A dissertation followed, and the book that sprung from it, The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, was released only two years after he took his Ph.D. in 1966. Even in the book's title, traces of Lentricchia's double-edged obsession begin to shine. The pleasures of language and radicalism of artists and critics--the two strands that entwine his career--were present already in his first work of scholarship.

From his assistant professor's chairs at UCLA and then UC-Irvine, Lentricchia's early scholarship began to unfold. In Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, which he considers his "weakest book," he argued for Frost's place "as a welcome member in the company of Eliot, Stevens, and Yeats," as someone engaged with the literary and philosophical ideas of his day. Lentricchia waited nearly two years for the book to find a publisher; during this time he wrote Robert Frost: A Bibliography, 1913-1974. Once the two works were published, in 1975 and 1976, Lentricchia says he grew bored. "It's sort of a motif in my life; I find myself written out in a certain vein and look for something else to do to keep myself interested."