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For twenty years, Melville enthusiasts have gathered at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to read Moby Dick out loud, continuously, from start to finish. Moby Dick is a book that many people claim to have read but have not finished, and for good reason: it is preposterous. Ponderously long (the first edition was 927 pages), laden with idiosyncratic vocabulary and run-on sentences lasting paragraphs at a stretch, it is unpleasant to parse and implausibly delivered in the first person by a vague, pompous, clumsily homoerotic narrator. It is gory and boring, disjointed and weird, and at times transcendently brilliant.  I sat through more than half of it, read by a cast of volunteers including a bestselling author, the Mayor of New Bedford, a local pastor, and ordinary fans, including myself. 

Over a substantial breakfast at Rose Alley I struck up a conversation with a couple on their way to the reading. They lived in New Bedford but were attending for the first time, having listened to Moby Dick on audiobook while walking their dogs over the course of the previous year. They seemed impressed that I had signed up to read, though in truth it had not occurred to me to attend without reading, and I had secured a randomly assigned ten minute time slot. The first six chapters were performed to a packed museum gallery by Nathaniel Philbrick, who recently published a book called In the Heart of the Sea, about the sinking of the whaling ship Essex and the events that inspired Moby Dick. I had trouble hearing in the cavernous space, and wandered through the museum looking at scrimshaw and the unlikely assortment of people, most of them clutching dog-eared copies of the novel, who had come to watch. 

Chapters 7-9 of Moby Dick take place in the Seamen’s Bethel, a chapel in downtown New Bedford decorated with marble plaques listing the names of sailors lost at sea. In the novel, Ishmael attends services at the chapel, the preacher tells the story of Jonah, and the congregation sings a hymn called The Ribs and Terrors in the Whale. The scene is effectively recreated during the marathon, with a local pastor reading the sermon in the text from a pulpit carved to resemble the bow of a ship, and hearing Melville’s description of the chapel in 1851 while looking at memorials to men and women who died in the past decade was surprisingly moving. I first read Moby Dick more than a century after whaling had ceased to be a livelihood, and it did not occur to me until I was in the chapel how much of suspension of disbelief the 21st century reader really needs to understand the text compared to Melville’s contemporaries. Of course, we still get the literary theme of man versus nature, and most of us have seen The Perfect Storm and therefore are reminded that our seafood comes with a human price, but how often do we actually contemplate that our great-grandparents required the rendered fat of intelligent mammals, sometimes with devastating casualties, to turn the lights on?

I read several hours after we left the chapel, and was given the chapter where Ishmael meets the mates and harpooners of the Pequod. Watching the readers before me was nerve wracking. The pacing of Melville’s prose can be difficult, especially unrehearsed, and it is hard not to trip over unfamiliar words and unusual punctuation. Nevertheless, I gave it as much enthusiasm as I could, and found that it was actually easier to follow the flow of the story when I was bombastic. The best readers, the ones I tried to emulate, managed to find humor. I got to a section describing the Second Mate Stubb’s pipe and finally hit my stride, pausing for the punch lines. Unfortunately, according to my mother, the sound on the live broadcast malfunctioned and my ten minutes amounted to nothing more than a figure gesticulating wildly in the background of a silent screen. But a few audience members patted me on the back and complimented how well I had held up, and that made all the difference. 

By evening, the Pequod had set sail and a free chowder buffet was set up to fortify attendees for the night ahead. A local theater company performed the chapter Midnight, Forecastle, which is written in the form of a play. After they took their bows, the main doors of the museum were locked and attendees not staying the night - including my husband and more than half the rest of the crowd - left, while the rest of us headed upstairs and staked out spots in the reading gallery or the carpeted halls surrounding it. I envied the people who had brought sleeping bags and coolers of snacks; I had my coat and a bottle of raspberry lemonade. Some of the attendees sat bolt upright in chairs and appeared to be reading along with every word. I propped myself in a corner and listened with my eyes closed, for hours. 

It is hard to picture what other people experience when they read. I have been told that some people say each word out loud to themselves in their minds (presumably? maybe?) in their own voice. I read quickly, and when I am immersed in a text, it is almost like a movie playing before me: I don’t notice the armature of vocabulary, punctuation and grammar that constructs the sentences, I see the images. Reading Moby Dick at my own pace put me on the deck of the Pequod, and I didn’t care about the seventy five word sentences. Listening to it read out loud, in ten minute increments, by readers with wildly varied delivery, was immersive in a different way. I didn’t get sucked into the text, I felt every sentence. When Ishmael took his first ride in a whaleboat and realized the suicidal danger of what he was doing, I was forced to pay attention to every moment. By the time Stubb killed a whale and ate a steak from it - a process that took several chapters - I was cold and hungry. I looked at the moonlight on the ocean visible from the gallery window, and craved rare sperm whale steak like the 21st century had never existed. 

I imagine that for people who are better at dealing with sleep deprivation than I am, the really wonderful part of the Moby Dick marathon comes in the final chapters, when Ahab finally tracks down the whale and destroys himself and everyone else except Ishmael trying to kill him (The statute of limitations on spoilers should have run out on that by now, though maybe in 1852 this paragraph would have been equivalent to speculating about what happened to Jon Snow). Anyway, I wouldn’t know. I made it as far as this passage, and fled the room at six am in the throes of an uncontrollable giggle fit:

“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!”

And that, readers, was where exhaustion got the better of me. Out of the fog rising over Buzzard’s Bay I imagined the ghost of Herman Melville, laughing at me, a grown-ass woman huddled under a coat, going pop-eyed over his double entendres.  I was done, and I drank a cup of tea and went home.