Every midwinter, on the first weekend of January, the Atlantic port-town of New Bedford on the Massachusetts coast hosts a reading marathon of the novel Moby-Dick, by American author Herman Melville. You sit and listen to the book read aloud from start to end for 26 hours. It seems hard to fathom why anyone would put themselves through such an ordeal. Not many venture to read the famed literary classic about a whale and a one-legged captain, let alone finish; it’s very long and dense. Fewer still, after all that effort, end up liking it. Yet those who do, I’m told, make up one of the most cult-like fandoms in English literature. I count myself among them, having read the book as a teenager in Pasir Ris, by the placid Johor Strait where the briny air stirs longing for adventure and escape.
Could I last the whole event, I wondered.
A half-day’s journey by road from New York, New Bedford was once the international whaling capital. In the nineteenth century, intrepid harpooners set out from its harbour scouring the seven seas to wage battle on those mighty mammals of the deep. Their prize: a waxy, amber-coloured liquid called sperm oil, found in the head of the sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus. Sperm oil was esteemed as a source of illumination prior to the rise of cheaper fuels like kerosene, as it produced a bright, odourless and smokeless flame. Fetching a high premium in the global market, it turned New Bedford into “the city that lit the world”.
It’s also where the mysterious protagonist of Moby-Dick—opening with the line “call me Ishmael”—begins his epic journey as a crewmember on board the Pequod, a whaling vessel. Little does he know that the ship is led by a tyrant, Captain Ahab, who’d had his leg bitten off by a sperm whale so large, white and fierce, that frightened sailors called it Moby-Dick. Consumed by mad rage, Ahab bends the Pequod’s crew to his quest for vengeance.
The Moby-Dick Marathon, appropriately held at the New Bedford Whaling Museum has been going on for 27 years. Salty Ng, a Singaporean artist (whom Jom profiled last year), made a collaborative work there in 2021 in response to the marathon, when it was briefly held online due to the pandemic. (The tagline for that Zoom edition was lifted from the novel: “As for me, I am tormented by an everlasting itch for all things remote.”)
New Bedford’s Moby-Dick Marathon isn’t the only one, however, as others have been organised by museums and libraries across the United States. But the one in New Bedford feels special as several key chapters of the novel are set there and mention its landmarks. It also commemorates the anniversary of Herman Melville’s own historical departure from the town in 1841 on board a whaling ship called the Acushnet. That experience inspired Moby-Dick.
On the morning of the Marathon, Melville scholars scratched heads over questions submitted by participants. White New Englanders, mostly, and old enough to be my parents. They delighted in every minutiae, down to the material used for lances and harpoons in the whaleman’s arsenal. Does the “monkey-rope” in Chapter 72 exist? The detail of these questions amused me as much as the fact that there were actual answers. These weren’t mere dabblers. They were cognoscenti.
Crowded into one of the galleries of the Whaling Museum, we were launched into the novel’s now-legendary opening passages, amid whooping and applause. I got goosebumps. The marathon invites someone distinguished for the honour of First Reader each year, and this time it was TV actress Taylor Schilling, who was introduced as an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominee. Her rendition was so good, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t heard of her.
Not everyone is a trained actor, though. Drawn from an open-call of public volunteers, reading sign-ups were overwhelmed by more than 400 people putting their names down. Each person has five minutes, and the talent varies. A monotonous reader can diminish the dramatic force of Melville’s prose, or miss the comic stresses that convey its humour. Yet the power of these words alone had been enough to gather so many voices eager to carry and convey them. Deeply influenced by Shakespeare and Milton, Melville’s language is profoundly oratory. Even the descriptive lines can be so breathtaking they demand to be recited. Try reading aloud this portrait of whales being herded by a chase at sea:
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
This is language that “enters your blood”, said one devotee, a writer often brought to tears by Moby-Dick.
But I couldn’t forsake the toilet and lunch for all those beautiful sentences. After three hours of listening, I stepped out into the quaint streets surrounding the Whaling Museum. It’s in New Bedford’s small conserved maritime district, belted by urban sprawl. A four-lane motorway blocks the pretty waterfront where fishing-boats, instead of whalers, today lay anchor. But the sea is still fresh on your nose. I saw a gull in flight smash a live cockle on the street right in front of me, before descending to savour its ocean snack.
The “patrician” homes that Melville described still stand, mansions of the Quaker elite who once managed whaling voyages from land safe and dry, their accounting work lit by sperm oil lamps. Those who actually risked their lives obtaining the oil went to a church called the Seamen’s Bethel before setting sail. Comfort in this world for the wealthy and salvation in the next for everyone else.
The Marathon moved there for the performance of those chapters in Moby-Dick set in a church based on the Bethel. I went back to the Museum for another three-hour stretch, rapt again by words, but also relieved when evening came and brought along with it some complimentary New England clam-chowder. I thought about whether I should stay through the night or go back to my hotel.
A local drama company performed Chapter 40, which Melville had written like a script with stage directions and lines for each character. Several chapters in Moby-Dick were written in contrasting genres, such as monologues, scientific treatises (“Cetology”), and even a gastronomic essay (“The Whale as a Dish”). This shape-shifting form is part of what makes Moby-Dick feel encyclopaedic, while exposing the limits of human intellect in the face of nature’s unknowable power. Ishmael boasts that the enormity of his story’s subject made it a struggle to tell. “Give me a condor’s quill!” he cries, “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me…”
I’m sceptical of canons, or the idea that certain works of art and literature have an inherent greatness that makes them ‘universal’. All canons are political. But Moby-Dick’s meditations on the cosmos, and anxieties about fragile humanity in it, have allowed its very local nineteenth-century American concerns to resonate today. Many commentators invoked the novel during the Trump era, when the US (and the world) seemed beholden to the whims of a real-life Captain Ahab. As much as Ahab’s hunt for the hated whale was about the tragic consequences of megalomania, it also proclaimed Man’s futile quest for domination. Moby-Dick feels at home with the contemporary turn in art, academia and civil society to recognise our entanglement with other species and ecological systems.
Whaling, responsible for the near-extinction of sperm whales, remains a complicated political issue. Icelandic and Japanese whalemen have continued to hunt them despite an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986, angering militant environmentalist groups like Greenpeace. While highlighting the importance of conservation, the Whaling Museum’s exhibits also showed how whaling was a meaningful cultural activity in many seafaring societies. The Inupiat of Alaska believed that whales gave themselves willingly to honourable hunters, while Japanese harpooners historically invoked Buddha to ease the whale’s passage into the Pure Land. Closer to us, the whalers of Flores use modest sailboats rather than factory ships with high-tech harpoons, and are guided by traditional taboos. They are exempt from the international ban.
Such relationships with nature, reciprocal rather than extractive, are not foreign to our shores. Singaporeans are reckoning with our own long local traditions of ecological care, seeing them as openings and possibilities, rather than just obstacles to development. A sperm whale carcass that drifted to Jurong island in 2015, after being hit by a vessel in the Indian Ocean, points to our existence in the same vulnerable pond. The whale, as Moby-Dick showed, contains various domains—the economy, labour, culture, spirituality, the environment, and politics—in its bulk.
It wasn’t lost on Melville that violence against nature emerges from the same hierarchical logic that produced the racism of his time. “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian”, Ishmael quipped before joining the multi-ethnic labour that built global industry. Given our expectations surrounding dead white men’s novels, this ambiguity may be a surprise. The first time I read Moby-Dick, I was struck by its tender embrace of difference, especially since Melville lived through unrelenting American and European colonial expansion. His Native American, African-American and Polynesian characters are complex and layered. Scholars have suggested Moby-Dick’s terrifying whiteness to be a racial metaphor.
There’s still no denying the colonial worldview that seeps into Moby-Dick: Malays appear as stereotypical pirates in Chapter 87, pursuing the Pequod mid-hunt in the Sunda Straits. Even then, Ishmael notes the ironic reversal of chaser and chased. With its wall-like islands, the Malay archipelago seemed to guard itself “from the all-grasping western world.” Like Ishmael, we still live in a racist and all-grasping world. Melville’s London publisher thought the book was so progressive—what we might today call “woke”—that it censored lines considered inflammatory.
Midnight approached, and my eyes grew heavy, but as I was about to leave, the organisers called for stand-by readers. I’d been hoping for a slot to open, as sign-ups closed when I tried to register. I became Reader 104, relishing all my five minutes of Chapter 53: “The Gam”. Sleep was the prize I determined for doing my part in the chain of narration. Through the night the marathon made steady progress, and by the following morning we were in the novel’s final quarter. The Museum’s event space overlooks the harbour, clear sunlight accompanying our entry into Moby-Dick’s darkest chapters.
Sinister omens forewarn Ahab as he nears his cursed object. The level-headed chief mate Starbuck (whose name was later stolen by a café chain) begs Ahab to abandon his unholy mission. One reader chokes up voicing Starbuck’s forlorn thoughts of never seeing his wife and child again. For a brief moment, Ahab almost changes his mind. But feeling like some hidden force commands him to persist, he wonders “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God or who, that lifts this arm?” In the silent, packed room, I felt a lump in my throat.
As with each time I read Moby-Dick, I came away from the Marathon enlarged—oceanically, cosmically. But this time, what changed it was the act of listening. It’s how our ancestors experienced epics and sagas before the modern genre of the novel appeared in the last couple of centuries. Listening to a story gives more than the conviviality which reading alone doesn’t provide. Gathering with strangers to experience words physically, you share a chuckle or a sigh when you land together on a perfect turn of phrase. This is the ethical effect that books have on us, nudging us towards a gentler temperament.
Such a disposition also emerges from the particular relationship to time engendered by books, what the Chicago bookseller Jeff Deutsch calls the “slow time” of discovery when we browse or read without hurry. It cultivates openness and curiosity. As our very own Kampung Gelam bookseller Ibrahim Tahir put it, reading becomes a “civilisational activity” because you follow an argument or narrative to its completion, withholding your judgement. A reading marathon, while committed to a time limit, still acts as a similar immersive space to inhabit a book. I hardly checked my phone as the hours went by. Singapore has poetry readings aplenty, and a 24-hour long marathon of SingLit was held in 2013 by Ng Yi-Sheng and the late Lee Wen. Perhaps the novel marathon could be another extension of our literary ecosystem, helping re-attune us to the art of listening long and slow. Perhaps like whales, sounding the depths.
Faris Joraimi is Jom’s history editor.
Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.
