Taking Turns at Oars in Reading of ‘Moby Dick’ : Students Wade Through Classic in About a Day

Call them exhausted. Saturday afternoon, almost 23 hours after launching into the most famous introduction in American literature with the words “Call me Ishmael,” 18 stalwart but sleepy participants concluded what was probably the first West Coast marathon reading of the Herman Melville classic “Moby Dick.”

“I feel like I waded through a long river,” said 21-year-old Claremont McKenna College student Tony Poer, who slogged doggedly along with the ill-fated Ishmael through tempests and harpoonings, scurvy and shipwrecks, to the bitter end. But Poer, one of 37 present at the beginning, confessed to “dozing off a few times.”

Despite being punchy from lack of sleep, participants, who read the novel aloud in four-page shifts, waxed enthusiastic about the novel approach to digesting Melville’s 536-page paean to the second best-known cetacean after Shamu.

Story Comes Alive

“A girl like me, I don’t care about a gigantic whale, but when you’re with a bunch of people who are excited about the story it makes the reading lively and interesting,” said 19-year-old Deborah Such.

Most of the participants are enrolled in Claremont McKenna professor Robert Faggen’s class “Individualism in American Literature,” and have to read the book anyway, as they’ll be tested on the material during final exams. But Tony Kemp, who teaches American and Medieval literature at USC, came merely to lend scholarly support and a well-modulated British accent.

“It’s a fun type of thing to do,” said Kemp, who praised the poetic rhythms of Melville’s prose and his mythic figures.

“Melville works for American literature the way Homer works for Greek culture,” said Kemp.

But although readings of “Ulysses” are a time-honored tradition in New York City on Bloomsday--June 16th--few scholars have ever heard of reading “Moby Dick” all the way through out loud, or any American author, for that matter.

And not every scholar greets the idea with Faggen’s enthusiasm.

“Like all ideas of that kind, it’s kind of silly,” said Daniel Aaron, a professor emeritus of American culture and literary history at Harvard University who also has taught classes on Melville.

“If it’s going to be a relay race read by one voice after another, I can’t imagine anything more dreadful and tedious.”

Aaron stopped to consider.

“On the other hand, it could be thrilling and dramatic. Melville was intoxicated with the language, he was one of the great prose masters of the 17th Century, with marvelously long sentences, like a great wave that builds up and builds up and crashes at the end of the paragraph.”

Alas, the marathon included readers with hesitant and choppy styles as well as those with eloquent cadence.

But the students didn’t seem to mind.

“It was a unique experience,” said Steve Fairchild, a 21-year-old majoring in economics and psychology. “When you got a good reader you could relax as if you were being told a bedtime story.”

The reading itself took place in a cozy sitting room at Claremont McKenna outfitted with plush, cushioned armchairs. Students and faculty members sprawled along the carpet with blankets and pillows or draped across carved-wood settees, fortified by apples, submarine sandwiches and bottled water.

As Faggen read the opening lines of the novel, Diane Anderson and Ann Taylor clasped hands in anticipation.

At 6 p.m., while still reading, Faggen led a procession of the faithful into a nearby campus dining room for a dinner which, in keeping with the seafaring theme, featured lobster and swordfish.

Throughout the early evening, participants drifted in and out of the sitting room, but as the night wore on, the reading took on the intimate feel of a slumber party. Readers yawned and suppressed giggles at amusing passages. Others napped peacefully, oblivious to the damp, drizzly November of the soul that washed over the narrator and Captain Ahab.

Often, students would wake up on cue when the person next to them started reading. Things really heated up again late Saturday morning.

“Especially the last 100 pages, the class was really into it because the story really builds up and is so suspenseful,” Fairchild said. “When I heard that last sentence, I felt I had really accomplished something.”

So did Faggen, who saw the marathon reading as fitting in with America’s long oral storytelling tradition.

For Faggen, who joined Claremont McKenna’s faculty in 1988 after earning a Ph.D. at Harvard in which he completed a dissertation on how Charles Darwin’s theories influenced the poetry of Robert Frost, a marathon reading of “Moby Dick” seemed a natural way to let students hear that music.

Several years ago, while still a graduate student at Harvard, Faggen led his first marathon reading of the Melville classic, a cozy affair attended by about 10 other grad students.

This time, the turnout was almost quadruple as Faggen led his charges through the search of the wily white whale that proved the bane of Captain Ahab and generations of high school students.

At 1:55 on Saturday afternoon, as the devious-cruising ship Rachel found the shipwrecked orphan narrator, bringing the book to a close, both students and teacher said they felt a true sense of accomplishment.

“We had a great time,” Faggen exulted. “We read ‘Moby Dick.’ ”

Faggen says he might make it an annual event if students are willing.

But for now, the founder of Claremont McKenna’s equivalent of the Dead Poet’s Society says he’s thinking about orchestrating another marathon.

Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”