Moby-Dick Marathon: Mighty tribute to the mighty mammal

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Crunch time is on for Karyn Parsons, an actor and writer known for her turn as the affluent and stylish Hilary Banks on the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” Now she’s grappling with a quite different character, as she prepares  to channel the lone survivor of a doomed whaler, opening the epic “Moby-Dick” simply enough: “Call me Ishmael.”

Parsons has been reading and listening to readings, working to master the language and story as she prepares to lead a lineup of some  220 readers stepping up for their 5- to 10-minute segments at the New Bedford Whaling Museum starting Saturday, Jan. 4. Reading Herman Melville’s best-known novel from one day into the next, they’ll tell the whole tale — from “Loomings” to “The Sermon,” from the encyclopedic “Cetology” to “The Chase” and the meditative “Epilogue.”

The 19th-century language, with its wordy sentences and often unfamiliar vocabulary, takes getting used to. Parsons is keyed up for the challenge.

“It’s exciting to be part of it,” Parsons said in an interview this week. “It’s a little daunting, I will admit.”

Parsons will be heading to New Bedford from Providence, other readers and visitors from closer and farther afield. Visitors to the Moby-Dick Marathon have represented more than 30 U.S. states and several countries. In 2024 the distant travel award went to an Australian couple whose distaff member read a few pages from the closing of “Ahab’s Leg” to the opening of “The Carpenter.”

“It is a destination,” said Amanda McMullen, president and chief executive officer of the Whaling Museum, now presiding over the 29th marathon, her seventh since joining the organization in the spring of 2018. The event has run every year since 1997, including online pandemic versions in 2021 and 2022.

The reading will be live-streamed on the museum website; McMullen figures 1,500 to 2,000 people will visit during the free-admission weekend of Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 4 and 5. 

A moving marathon

The reading flows through three spots in the museum itself — the Bourne Building housing the Lagoda whaler model, the auditorium, and the Harbor View Gallery — and the Seamen’s Bethel across Johnny Cake Hill. 

As the marathon unfolds in one part of the museum, in another, a shortened version of the novel is read entirely in Portuguese starting at 2 p.m. Saturday.

Proceedings launch in the Harbor View Gallery on Friday, Jan. 3, the anniversary to the day in 1841 when Melville left the New Bedford and Fairhaven harbor as a sailor aboard the whaler Acushnet. Some 18 months later he jumped ship in what is now French Polynesia, but not before gathering material for his first book, “Typee,” published in 1846, and for “Moby-Dick,” published in 1851.

Friday’s schedule calls for a buffet dinner and — in cooperation with the Melville Society — a talk by the two co-authors of “Dayswork,” a novel published last year dealing, in part, with a woman’s preoccupation with Melville. 

As of late December, dinner tickets at $75 for members and $100 for non-members were available. Reader slots were booked solid, as there were about two requests for every available time slot. Reserved seats are also all taken for the reading in the Seamen’s Bethel.

There’s a standby list for readers willing to step in if someone doesn’t show up for their reserved time. They’ll help keep the event moving, along with more than 100 volunteers who mind the clock, check readers in and keep folks queued for their moment. 

For the first time, readers chose slots directly, as one would make an online restaurant reservation. McMullen said the new system improves on the previous approach of choosing readers by  “lottery” run with a spreadsheet and random sorting. 

“To my amazement, successful from the beginning …”

The event has developed since some 75 to 100 readers signed up on a paper schedule for that first marathon in 1997, said Anne Brengle, who was the museum’s top executive from 1994 to 2007. 

She recalled that about as soon as she walked in, a docent, Irwin Marks of Acushnet, approached her with a suggestion: let’s do a community reading of Moby-Dick start to finish. Marks said they were doing it every summer in Mystic Seaport aboard the Charles W. Morgan, the last remaining whaling ship. 

Brengle was skeptical. 

“I had worries about it,” said Brengle, who now lives on Florida’s west coast. She said she was concerned that it was someone else’s idea, and she did not want to be “raining on Mystic’s parade.”

She called Mystic Seaport to hear their thoughts. She said she made clear that the museum would stage the event in January, marking the anniversary of Melville’s voyage, not competing for a summer read-a-thon crowd. 

The Mystic crew raised no objections; Brengle warmed to the idea.

“It was January and it was a sleepy time, and why not,” she said. 

Brengle said much credit for the marathon’s early success goes to Lee Heald, the former director of AHA!, whom Brengle hired to direct programming and education. Among other things, Heald suggested that the museum work with the Melville Society to give the event scholarly heft.

“It was pretty big, and to my amazement successful from the beginning,” Brengle said. “I didn’t know how many people out there would be so interested it would sustain audience interest through the night into the next day.” 

Activities running alongside the reading have been added over the years, including bookmark-making, a scavenger hunt, discussions with Melville scholars, and a  “Stump the Scholars” segment inviting visitors to pose questions about Moby-Dick.

Crowds have grown threefold and more from the 500 or so visitors who appeared in 1997, as Brengle recalled.

“It was something I never in my wildest dreams would have dreamed up to do,” said Brengle.

Key spots for designated hitters

Much has changed, much remains the same. The museum still chooses readers for certain passages, including the opening, read at noon Saturday after the tolling of eight bells. In nautical tradition, eight bells marks a changing shipboard watch.

In 2024 Michael J. Bobbitt, executive director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council read the opening. In recent years the opening act was Taylor Schilling, known for “Orange is the New Black,” and Sam Waterston, whose two turns on “Law & Order” followed a movie and theater career going back to the 1970s.

Now comes Parsons, founder and president of Sweet Blackberry Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to bringing stories of Black American achievement to school children through films and books.

She recalled that she was at the Whaling Museum in the summer for a screening of “Lump,” a film directed by her husband, Alexandre Rockwell, when a museum representative approached her to ask if she would open the next marathon.

Married to a Boston native for more than 20 years, she’s spent lots of time in Westport and had heard of the marathon but never attended. She readily accepted, and in late December finally had time to bear down on preparation.

She’ll read the six pages of the opening chapter, “Loomings,” as the narrator recommends what to call him — perhaps Ishmael really is his name, but who knows —  then waxes poetic on the abiding magnetism of the sea. Working with Melville’s language reminds her a bit of her experience working years ago on a Shakespeare audition. 

“Once I understood it better it was fun and it was fresh and it was different,” said Parsons, who has published books for children on Black American experience. “It kind of excites your soul.”

As the opening chapter has been assigned to a well-known person, the part of Father Mapple, sermonizing from the bowsprit pulpit at the Seamen’s Bethel, has been offered to a clergy member. 

The Rev. David A. Lima — pastor of New Seasons Worship Center and executive minister of the Inter-Church Council of Greater New Bedford —  had greatness thrust upon him some 10 or 12 years ago after the late Rev. Dr. Edward R. Dufresne, who had been the council’s executive minister, decided he would relinquish the Father Mapple part. The museum asked Lima to step in.

Lima said someone approached him after one year’s reading to say that it was the first time they’d heard any part of the Bay State-based story rendered with an actual Massachusetts accent.

“I said, ‘What Massachusetts accent?’” Lima recalled.

Father Mapple appears early, as proceedings move for three chapters from the Bourne Building to the Bethel. His sermon invoking the biblical Jonah suggests things to come in the journey of the Pequod.

“It’s almost a foreshadowing,” Lima said. “The battle with the whale, which is a battle with the spirit.”

As in years past, Mayor Jon Mitchell has been chosen to read “The Street” chapter, describing scenes of New Bedford — “sweet to see” in summer bloom, where dandies mix with whale men, where “actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners.”

McMullen said she will again have the last word, reading the “Epilogue” as the top executive has since Brengle first did it. 

McMullen called it “nerve racking,” but said she’s eased into the role since her first turn in 2019, when her pounding pulse set her Apple Watch vibrating. 

“I just thought ‘my God, don’t screw this up,’” she recalled. 

Much of the trick, she said, is finding your breath as sentences meander, starting off without always making clear where they’re going. 

Untangling textual mysteries

“Epilogue” is just one paragraph, but it’s a significant one. It explains how the  opening narrator, Ishmael — well, if that really is his name, as he merely says “call me” by that name — survives the Pequod calamity.  

So, at least that question is answered. Others, not so much, providing fodder for “Stump the Scholars.”

Is Ahab a first name or a last? What kind of name is Starbuck, and why do so many of the characters have just one name? Shiploads of detail about whales and whaling, and no first names? And, by the by: in his previous run-in with the White Whale, which leg did Captain Ahab lose?

The museum confirms the answer to that last question: no one knows.

The mysteries are of a piece with the novel’s central enigmas, and often obscure language. 

Rev. Lima said that from the start he was somewhat accustomed to the language, with its rhythmic echoes of the King James Bible. Still, he said, care must be taken with the words.

Indeed, woe to the reader ambling along merrily only to stumble on “spermaceti,” “mammiferous,” or “circumambulated.” Any number of proper nouns — “Hardicanutes,” “Tongatobooarrs,” “Erromangoans” — test the most nimble tongue.

Chris McEnroe, a marathon reader since 2012 who has been teaching “Moby-Dick” at Tabor Academy in Marion for about 10 years, said Melville is known to invent his own vocabulary.

“It’s not uncommon to be working through and find a word that you think: ‘that’s not really a word,’” said McEnroe, who graduated from Albany Academy in New York, Melville’s high school.

Note any number of idiosyncratic Melville coinages. Such nouns as “allurings,” “leewardings,” and adjectives such as “fossiliferous,” “omnitooled,” “uncatastrophied.”

McEnroe said he keeps a range of chapters in mind when reserving a time, so he can be familiar with the text. Knowing the meaning is key to an effective reading, he said.

“The first year I stumbled through as best I could,” said Mark Soucy, general manager of a theater company in Needham who first did the marathon in 2011. He’ll miss it this year because of a scheduling conflict, but said he’s drawn back by love of the novel.

“It’s like its own type of poetry,” Soucy said.

Jack Garvey of Plum Island plans to make the 100-mile drive down for his fourth reading. He’s always trying to score his favorite chapter, “The Dart,” a meditation on the harpoon. He sees it as a kind of op-ed column, which he happens to write for The Daily News of Newburyport. 

So far, he’s one for three hitting “The Dart.”

A musician at King Richard’s Faire in Carver and former college English teacher, Garvey said he figures he’s read everything Melville has written. He plans to stay through Saturday night into the morning. 

“It’s really mesmerizing,” Garvey said. “I guess it’s comparable to a religious observance. If the Bible is God speaking to us, then Moby-Dick is as close as we’ve ever come to a response.”

Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.

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