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. 189 . T Conclusion Poetry in and beyond Moby-Dick he sound of the Moby-Dick Marathon reading is a democratic pastiche of voices intoning the prose poetry of Melville’s narrative. Thus far, as a way of uncovering the essence of the marathon reading experience I have highlighted Melville’s more lyrical expressions of the romantic allure of a nonlinear and risk-laden quest, the political hierarchy once at sea, and finally the crushing lows and exultant highs of the novel. Sound connects all of those inspired moments, driving Melville’s aesthetic power. As such, no better context could be imagined for the fullest appreciation of the poetry of Moby-Dick than in the ritual dramatization of its sound showcased at the marathon reading. In this conclusion, I revisit my persistent emphasis throughout this book on the physicality of Moby-Dick and its marathon reading. I have observed that the novel’s habit of mind, which so systematically weds word to thing, thought to fact, is well suited to the marathon reading’s embodied presence, its group synergy of breathed, lived experience.The conduit between thought and thing, body and soul is sound, both as figured in the novel and as the central focus of attention during the reading.The reading may showcase the materiality of whaling in the artifacts that adorn the New BedfordWhaling Museum in which it is held, and indeed readers often show a deep attachment to their personal annotated copies of the novel, but the essential focus is the live sound of the reading itself. The sound of Melville’s poetic prose is not an untouchable airy apparition; it emphatically exists in the sensible world, and thus takes on a physical heft in what Roland Barthes calls music’s erotic dimension, its textured “grain of voice” associated with “the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” This is the very point of contact between the spiritual and material worlds, “the only erotic part of a pianist’s body, the pad of the fingers whose ‘grain’ is so rarely heard.”1 . 190 . Print culture finds expression in the marathon reading as audible, nuanced art, a sensory and thus physical phenomenon, however invisible, ephemeral, and lacking in tactility. The marathon reading seeks to reproduce Melville’s poetic grain of voice as inflected by, and indeed refracted through, the radically differentiated voices of its readers.This rainbow of voices corresponds well with Melville’s patchwork narrative structure of discursive chapters in Moby-Dick behind his masterful poly-vocal ventriloquism. On display in an oral performance of the novel are the disparate discourses from grand soliloquies at the bow to profane antics in the forecastle, from rollicking sailors’ songs to earnest legal defenses, from marine biological scientific reports to multiperspective mystical credos.As such, Moby-Dick is a prime example of Barthes’s assertion that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture,” even more so than most novels of the era.2 Further, Queequeg’s copy of his tattoos, themselves a copy of a cosmology from his native island, which he etches into his coffin lid, effectively illustrates the way “the writer can only intimate a gesture that is anterior, never original .”3 This is precisely what the postmodern world sounds like: newly intoning the past in a radically diverse present.The beauty is in the connectedness of the chaos, in the sound that uniquely brings the book to life for one day.The temporality of the event suggests that we might be able to defy time. The lengthy commitment to an ongoing two-to-three-week relationship with the novel becomes condensed, intensified, and distilled into this twenty-five-hour period. It is a symphony defiantly playing without pause in the face of culture dominated by commercial interruption. As Robert Milder writes, “Perhaps the reverence for old [great American novels] . . . comes from the longing for a language cleansed of debasement and misappropriation . . . and for a complex,if painful, historical truth irreducible to sound bytes.”4 Whitman scholar Ed Folsom has recently embarked on the project of writing the biography ofWaltWhitman’s Leaves of Grass, tracing the “life” of the text in its multiple revisions over decades from the first 1855 edition through its final revisions. Treating the text as a living thing, with a birth, evolution through various seasons, and eventual decline, has special relevance to reading a novel like Moby-Dick in one day. The assumption behind a marathon...

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