Only True Freaks Can Survive a 24-Hour Moby-Dick Reading Marathon. I Found Several.

If all the chairs are taken during the annual Moby-Dick Marathon, held every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, you can always climb aboard the Lagoda. It’s the museum’s pièce de résistance: a half-scale replica of an old whaling ship outfitted with the proper rigging for a yearslong hunt in the North Atlantic. (There are dispatchable paddle boats from which sailors could harpoon the beasts, and space for furnaces capable of rendering the harvested blubber into reeking vats of oil.) The original Lagoda was scrapped for parts in 1899 after the global whaling industry swooned into obscurity. This model, commissioned in 1916, has never touched the sea, but it does function as an impeccably Melvillian venue.

I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. “Call me Ishmael,” the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.

The Whaling Museum, nestled in southern Massachusetts near the mouth of Buzzards Bay, has hosted this marathon for the last 28 years as a way to celebrate its namesake city’s entwinement with the fiction. Herman Melville lived in New Bedford before embarking on the whaling voyage that inspired Moby-Dick, and this gritty little port town—with its cobblestone lanes and crowded marina—serves as the opening setting of the narrative. (The museum selected the first weekend of January to hold the event because it marks the anniversary of Melville’s own aquatic departure in 1841.)

In the decades since that first ceremony in 1997, the New Bedford marathon has morphed into something like a pilgrimage for Melville die-hards. Over 1,500 Moby-Dick fans poured into the city last weekend, some of them traveling from Alaska, Australia, and China. The event itself is essentially an avant-garde endurance stunt: 228 of the gathered attendees are selected to read the book in front of a microphone while everyone else follows along. If you are one of the lucky few chosen for the recital, the museum will assign a specific time—4:00 in the afternoon, 3:00 in the morning, noon the next day—where you’ll be called to the pulpit in front of the audience, watching both online and in person, to pick up where the last reader left off. This might be in the middle of one of Melville’s many miscellaneous nautical digressions, but if you’re lucky, you’ll receive a passage that occurs in the plotty action of the saga.

In that sense, the Moby-Dick marathon is exactly what it claims to be. There are no shortcuts or abridgements: The 209,117 words, all drafted in Melville’s famously quirky tongue, must be recited in a sleepless, steadfast rhythm, without any intermissions, if there is any hope of finishing it before Sunday night.

But here is where I must mention that for as long as it has been studied, Moby-Dick has cultivated a reputation for being a difficult, dry, and frustrating read. There is a vivacious, technicolor tale of vengeance at the story’s core—Captain Ahab, the leviathan, and so on—but the bulk of that drama is condensed toward the very end of the book. Spliced between those highlights are Melville’s prosaic treatises on whale taxonomy, arcane sailing techniques, and pseudoscientific marine biology. The “whale chapters,” as they’re known among Moby-Dick lifers, can almost read like an elaborate prank—as if Melville has intentionally sabotaged his prodigious storytelling gifts to curse future crops of English majors with reams and reams of tension-free clutter. To recite the whole novel in one unbroken sequence only intensifies Moby-Dick’s legendary obstinance. We are all trapped here, in the belly of the beast, one page at a time.

So for the vast majority of human beings, 25 uninterrupted hours of Moby-Dick might sound like hell on earth. I was there to understand the tiny fellowship who call it paradise.

“The first year I came, I was assigned a chapter called ‘Cetology,’ which is the shittiest part of any book ever written,” 37-year-old Savannah Strachan told me. She lives in New Orleans, works in finance, and was attending the marathon for the fourth time. “Melville spends 30 pages talking about fish, and the different types of fins that fish have. I had to start it off, and everyone in the room groaned, because we all knew that we were all going to be stuck together in this horrible part of the reading.”

“Afterwards, I got some clam chowder in the lobby, and people were coming up to me and commiserating about ‘Cetology,’ and the next time I came to the marathon I was bonding with whoever was assigned ‘Cetology,’ ” she continued. “It’s just great. It’s about being a nerd, in your nerd club, with all of your nerd friends. I don’t have religion in my life, but I do have Moby-Dick.”

Strachan speaks about Moby-Dick like it’s a fundamental part of her being. Her dad adored the book for its mythic themes of unquenchable revenge, to the point that it completely suffused her childhood. (When Strachan’s father died in 2007, the Episcopal priest quoted Captain Ahab in his eulogy.) Strachan finally read the book herself while she was enrolled in an undergraduate art program at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and learning to hate New York City. The novel stunned her. Moby-Dick was much funnier than she thought it would be—queerer, too, and considerably hornier. It seemed to articulate a fundamental truth about life on every page, which is an ineffable quality that all great novels possess. She’s loved it ever since.

“It’s always changing for me,” she said. “That’s the magic of Moby-Dick. When I read it for the first time, I found myself taken by the adventure, and all these hot guys taking off their shirts. As I got older, when I read it again, I connected to Melville’s ideas about attainable felicity, and how to find happiness in everyday life. At the marathon, I might latch onto something else.”

Strachan has not traveled to New Bedford alone. She is accompanied by 33-year-old Marc Beuttler, a doctor and old friend who’s also from New Orleans and currently lives in Connecticut. Unlike Strachan, Beuttler is a total Moby-Dick novice. His first time experiencing the book, in any capacity, was in the context of the marathon. Beuttler prepared for the sojourn by stuffing an ad hoc survival kit into his tote bag. He had a crumpled butt pillow, a thick plastic water bottle, and one of those foamy neckrolls that are most often deployed during international air travel. Wedged between all of the endurance material, of course, was an old copy of Moby-Dick, which Strachan bought for him years ago. “We’re coming full circle,” he said.

Beuttler has packed light compared to some of the other attendees here. Calvin Gimpelevich, a 34-year-old writer from Boston, has a full-blown sleeping bag ensconced in one of the museum’s lockers. He intends to use it during the witching hours, from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., when the museum mutates into a disheveled tent city—the bodies of unconscious bohemians strewn about the gallery as the Pequod sails deeper into the inky blackness. “I literally brought camping supplies,” he quipped.

If there is one thing most people at this marathon have in common, it’s that Moby-Dick intersected with a particularly profound moment in their lives. Gimpelevich is no different. He tells me that his dad bought him the book when he was 7 years old, and that he lugged it along—like a glorified doorstop—through the constant barrage of sketchy subleases that defined his 20s. That finally changed five years ago, when Gimpelevich fell ill and found himself confined to a bed. What better way to balm the monotony of recovery than by conquering a white whale?

“I knew about Moby-Dick’s grand narrative, but I didn’t realize how much fun it is,” Gimpelevich said when I asked him why the book resonated with him to the point that he’s willing to put his own corporeal fortitude to the test. “It’s almost like a stoner comedy. It has that vibe to it.”

Lulu Russell, a 25-year-old nuclear fusion scientist, had a slightly more poetic introduction to the novel. They found a copy in one of the many ramshackle public-use shelters that dot the Appalachian Trail, and spent the rest of their time on the hike—amid its sun-dappled mountains, Arcadian meadows, and terrifying squalls—in parallel with Ahab’s odyssey. It’s hard to imagine a better backdrop for an adventure story, the kismet of which is not lost on Russell. Perhaps the marathon could manifest the same electrifying sensation of their first encounter.

“Reading Moby-Dick in one sitting connects you with the commitment of spending three years stuck on a whaling boat,” said Russell. “If we were doing a marathon for Pride and Prejudice, we’d be spending a lot of time reading about people going to each other’s houses. It’s just not the same.”

Sean Dotson, on the other hand, came into contact with Moby-Dick 10 years ago during an intensive three-week study at Northeastern Illinois University. “It was one of those very rare interactions with art that you might have two or three times in your life, where it feels like the whole world has opened up to you in this new way,” he said, brandishing the same copy he once studied. The book was brutalized with annotations, passages underlined, words circled, and illegible notes scribbled in the margins.

“The marathon is a way to read the book with more structure and purpose,” said Dotson, who was taking the opportunity to explore Moby-Dick for the first time since he left school.
“To really get immersed in it.”

You heard that refrain in every corner of the New Bedford Whaling Museum: Moby-Dick is spectacular, hilarious, misunderstood, sonorous, and psychedelic. You will be enriched as a person by experiencing it, and you must ignore those who gripe about its quirks. This is where I must admit that I, too, have never read Moby-Dick, so I can say with confidence that if you are the least bit curious about the book, and require a gentle push to take the dive, then nothing will convince you more of its majesty than to sit on the deck of the Lagoda—amid a panorama of oceanic bric-a-brac and reclaimed nautical artifacts—watching the Nation of Melville burst into hysterics.

Moby-Dick’s famous first chapter, where Ishmael offers a paean to the sea, seems to have been memorized by some of the more enthralled members of the audience. Two dads, slouched under the mast pole to my left, silently mouthed some of Melville’s more lyrical turns—matching cadence with the narrator—with huge goofy grins painted on their faces, like they were reciting Lil Wayne punchlines at Coachella. A couple of college kids in front of me were limply splayed out on the floorboards with their eyes closed, absorbing the text in sensory isolation. A woman toward the front of the room had brought her knitting needles and a spool of yarn. For the next several hours, she’d steadily make progress on what appeared to be a sweater while Ahab battled the whale. It was a heaven I couldn’t understand, but a heaven nonetheless.

Strachan was right. So were Gimpelevich and Dotson. Moby-Dick is considerably weirder than I thought it would be. Some of the folks I spoke to at the marathon speculated that I might enjoy the beginning of the book the most, because it arrives before some of the author’s more obtuse diversions. They were right—the language is unambiguously beautiful, but Melville wields it in surprising ways. The speakers oscillated from the lectern until we arrived at Chapter 3, and the introduction of Queequeg—a tattooed Polynesian harpooner who shares a bed with Ishmael in a seaside inn before their adventure. When the pair awakened the next morning, Queequeg’s arm slinked over Ishmael in a marital embrace—the homoerotic implications were lacquered on thick by the readers. Wait, I thought, this is Moby-Dick? Sure enough, after a quick Google query, I found a litany of resources expanding on the novel’s queer undertones and how they echo through the pages and project onto Melville’s own ambiguous sexuality. I have spent my entire life believing that this book was a muscular chronicle about a man and his whale. No wonder that drives Moby-Dick people crazy.

A few hours later, in the late afternoon, the marathon migrated upstairs into a ballroom overlooking the frigid New Bedford harbor. It would remain there until the conclusion of the novel, no matter how long that took. The weekend weather report warned of a snowstorm crawling up from Virginia, threatening to blanket the outer Northeast with powder by Saturday night. Sure enough, I sat in a cushioned school chair absorbing the stagnating malaise of the dreaded “Cetology” as ominous clouds rolled in across the bay. The museum was packed to the gills at the beginning of the reading, but the headcount had dwindled some as day turned to night, and biological instincts clashed with Melvillian fanaticism. (By then, the theater seemed to be hosting about 70 people.) I could relate. Moby-Dick was still charming me with its eccentricity, but 50 chapters in an afternoon is enough to grind anyone down to a stump.

Kathryn Fidler, a 44-year-old who works for the government, took a lap around the museum’s corridors as the sun dipped out of sight. She came dressed in a whale-themed onesie, with its black monocular eyes pulled over her head like a hoodie. (Fidler originally bought the costume for a party at the Library of Congress. Her husband, of course, came dressed as Herman Melville.) She’s a veteran of these marathons, and warned me about the forthcoming graveyard stretch—when Moby-Dick melds with the altered brain chemistry of sleep deprivation.

“There’s this one chapter about the crew rendering out whale oil for hours on end,” she said. “Hearing that when you’re already really tired and hitting a wall definitely gives you a new perspective on how those characters felt.”

Fidler was right. By midnight, the marathon was already deteriorating. A stiff, freezing rain pounded the shivering streets of New Bedford, and museum custodians roped off the building’s nonessential exhibits—essentially confining all the brave voyagers into a single crucible. A young couple had collapsed on a portable mattress in the hallway, fidgeting in a restless sleep under blazing fluorescent lights. Only a few dozen of Melville’s troubadours remained, many of them zonked in their own half-consciousness, heads smushed into pillows propped against chair backs, or cocked over on lovers’ shoulders. The room had the parched air of a cellblock, and yet, a steady stream of readers continued to plow through the doldrums of Moby-Dick, never dropping the pace. Someone on stage read a passage about nocturnal seamen pumping water from a leak on a “dreary night,” the sound of which “dismally resounded through the ship.” At last we had arrived, the briny deep.

Downstairs in the lobby, a small gaggle of die-hards sucked down paper cups of black coffee, girding their bodies for the gantlet ahead. The marathon was slated to conclude at 1 p.m. on Sunday. We weren’t even halfway there, but my night was over. I needed to drive back to New York the next day, and I wasn’t going to risk a car accident in whale-induced delirium.
The Melville people, once again, proved to be so much stronger than I am.

But I dropped by the museum one last time in the morning, and wasn’t surprised to find that the marathon had been completely rejuvenated in dawn light. The population had sprung back up to its prime levels. Everyone in the theater was wide-awake, with their books crimped to the final hundred pages. The agony had given way to the sublime, which is Moby-Dick in a nutshell. Strachan told me that she scratched out two hours of sleep in the middle of the night before she was set to read at 9:30 a.m. She didn’t bring a blanket with her; instead Strachan hunkered down on the cold wooden floor with a couple of sweaters and let the exhaustion sweep her away. Was it miserable? Sure, but Strachan was somehow absolutely buoyant.

“There was a lot of suffering, boredom, and repetition in antiquity,” she said. “The Ancient Greeks knew what was going to happen at the end of Oedipus, and they still cried every time. There is something that our forefathers understood about doing something unpleasant to achieve a certain emotional state by the end of it. That’s what the marathon is for me.”

By the time I left, Massachusetts was already dappled in its first snow of the season. The Melvillians all returned home safely, while Captain Ahab sank to his watery grave. There is peace on the Atlantic, at least until January swings back around. For that is when the cult of Moby-Dick will reconvene in New Bedford, hardcovers cracked, “tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.”