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. 1 . D Introduction Melville Lives o not call me Ishmael. My role in writing this book about the annual Moby-Dick Marathon reading—a nonstop, twenty-five-hour immersion in Melville’s novel—may echo that of Ishmael aboard the Pequod. Like him, I am both a participant and an observer, deeply absorbed in the rituals unfolding and fully wedded to the task of retelling them in all their complexity , mystery, and dynamism. But I do not intend to speak with his voice, channel his spirit, narrate his story. Instead of playing the role of Ishmael, or Melville, for that matter, like Hal Holbrook’s lifetime of Disney-esque Mark Twain impersonations, I am interested in finding the Melville who lives today through Moby-Dick as showcased in the marathon readings of 2009 and earlier. Rather than serving up “cold pork,” as Charles Olson says in Call Me Ishmael (1947) while discussing the economic history of whaling in his now classic prose-poem homage to Moby-Dick, Chasing theWhiteWhale attempts to weigh, from an insider’s vantage point, the Moby-Dick Marathon reading— among the most significant events in contemporary print culture—“in the scale of the total society.”1 It was with trepidation that I traveled, in 2009, to meet with the disciples of Melville; if their obsession were anything like Melville’s, this would be an intense crew.As John Bryant, a regular attendee and editor-in-chief of Leviathan , the journal of the Melville Society, remarked, “God knows how many lunatics are out there doing this.”2 My initial apprehension would quickly transform to a new appreciation for Melville’s influence on New England culture and on the lives of nonacademic aficionados. I met Nephi Tyler, waterfront worker and son of a southern transplant navy man, who wore on his sleeve his admiration for his father’s participation in the reading.Theirs was more than an ordinary obsession; the novel was built into the fiber of their souls. I learned of howTyler’s father, who had sculpted whales as a hobby for . 2 . introduction years, held aloft his greatest creation in a ritual dedication of an antebellum house his other son had rebuilt.Another reader, MarkWojnar, his obsession for Melville reaching beyond the reasonable, deemed the marathon a greater priority than steady employment, as his attendance at the event was more consistent than his luck on the job market. Wojnar is a man for whom little else matters than Melville, his wisdom of Moby-Dick so profound as to win the praise of Melville’s great-great-grandson PeterWhittemore as well as the dean of Melville scholarship, Hershel Parker. People like these are not in it for literary amusement or diversion. The experience of reading the full novel over nearly twenty-five hours is not for the faint of heart, nor does it lend itself to pretension or superficiality. Like an athletic marathon,3 there is no way to fake it. Like pursuing the whale itself for months on end, reading and listening to twenty-five hours of Moby-Dick is equal parts heaven and hell. It becomes a communal experience with the potential for transcendence, a sort of group meditation with language. No reader is here for self-promotion. The objective, rather, is to function as a vessel for the palpitating spirit of Melville. Readers tune in to the music of Melville’s soul in the guise of the enigmatic force of vitality that is Moby-Dick, the product of one ofAmerica’s greatest writers surging at the very height of his powers. Here is not so much an intellectual feast, nor a series of one-act plays performed by the top brass of Melville scholarship. Instead the reading is a democratic chorus of voices, crossing national and gender lines with the same manic radical equality as the novel itself. Readers represent a Whitmanian song of occupations, including professors, fishermen, schoolteachers , selectmen, students, journalists, legislators, physicians, and clergy of all denominations. Each reading showcases a world of voices and languages, as selected passages are read in Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Danish, Spanish, or French, followed by that same passage in English to reflect both the crew’s cultural diversity and the global sweep of the Pequod’s voyage. The Moby-Dick Marathon is part of Melville’s surging cultural relevance today, something well chronicled in the extracts of references to him compiled in the preface ofAndew Delbanco’s Melville: HisWorld andWork. Melville has been referenced everywhere from...

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