Cover to cover: On the joys of marathon readings

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Linda Besner is a writer based in Montreal.

On June 16, 1904, the Irish writer James Joyce, then 22, went on his first date with a 20-year-old named Nora Barnacle. At first glance, she thought he was a Swedish sailor. “But when he spoke, well then,” Barnacle later wrote, “I knew him at once for just another Dublin jackeen chatting up a country girl.” A century and change later, pockets of the literarily inclined all over the world are still commemorating this romantic encounter in the form of Bloomsday: a celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first edition of which clocks in at 732 pages and describes a series of events occurring all over the course of that single day.

The most extreme form these celebrations take are marathon readings of the entire novel. They are a mainstay of college campuses and Irish pubs, and in 2013, 15 countries staged a global Bloomsday relay reading. It started at 8 a.m. local time with “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” in Auckland, New Zealand, and ended a day and a half later with a triumphal “Yes I said yes I will Yes” in Boston. All told, with breaks for eating fried kidneys and Banbury buns, public readings of the full novel tend to take about 34 hours.

Ulysses is not the only book that attracts this kind of endurance test. Moby-Dick has spawned its own marathon readings, as have The Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and, of course, the Book of Mormon. As an extreme sport for nerds, the appeal of this kind of durational reading offers a combination of the hallucinatory high that comes with pushing physical limits and the simple sleepover excitement of staying up late. As a way to bond over art, settling in for the long haul also tantalizes with the sense of inexorable revelation – when passing so much and such concentrated time in public communion with a single work, we can’t help but emerge together changed.

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Durational readings can be seen as a kind of participatory performance art, evoking other kinds of art “happenings” that transform the passage of time into material. Traditionally, many art forms are predicated upon an arrest of time – the poem that immortalizes a single moment, the painting that captures the sitter’s face as it was once and never will be again. By contrast, durational works are built out of the ongoingness of time. The patron saint of contemporary durational art is perhaps Marina Abramović, the Serbian conceptualist who famously sat absolutely still for a total of three months at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and looked into the eyes of whoever chose to sit down across from her. In order to sit motionless for seven hours a day, Ms. Abramović underwent a training regimen designed for NASA astronauts. Visitors flocked to the show; people cried; people vomited. “I did almost nothing, but they take this religious experience from it,” Ms. Abramović told The Guardian. “Art had lost that power, but for a while MoMA was like Lourdes.”

Some trace the departure point for durational performance art to a very unlikely source – the craze for marathon dance contests in the early 20th century. As historian Carol Martin wrote in her 1994 book, Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s, the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 had ignited a new kind of brinkmanship: Everyone wanted to know how far, how fast, how high and for how long the human body could go. At first, the records for dancing were child’s play. In 1923, a couple set a record in Sunderland, England, for dancing seven hours without stopping; just a few months later, a dance instructor beat them by a handy 20 hours at the Audubon Ballroom in New York.

In the 1920s, these new contests were seen as good, clean fun. But by the 1930s, the economic disaster of the Depression meant that dance marathons had taken on a darker character. With high unemployment and a scarcity of food and shelter, dance marathons became a kind of burlesque showcase of American desperation. Contests offered free food (as long as you kept dancing while you ate), and went on for months, with contestants only allowed to sleep for 15 minutes out of every hour – cots were rolled onto the dance floor so spectators could watch fatigued people collapse into them. Sleep-deprived dancers became violent, a 27-year-old died from sheer exhaustion, and cities began banning dance marathons altogether. The final world record was set in 1933 when a Minneapolis couple danced for five months straight – a total of 3,780 consecutive hours.

It’s hard not to conclude that the pain this couple suffered was an intrinsic part of the attraction for members of the public. Looking at a photo of one of these contests, I can sense the frightening abandonment of a young girl’s slump – her head flung back, her mouth open and her partner holding her up so that her knees don’t touch the floor (grounds for disqualification). In the front row of the stands, two matrons in pearl necklaces and cloche hats watch with faces full of disapproval and fascination. There is something eerie in the spectacle of someone willing to push themselves to extreme limits before our very eyes. Audience attraction to these feats of endurance is edged with brutality; our presence elevates the proceedings to a form of ritual sacrifice, in which the larger community is transformed by the suffering of a few.

There are certain metaphysical overtones to proceedings that warp our perception of time. In our day-to-day lives, time proceeds according to a certain set of routines and rules: We get up, start work by a certain hour, break for lunch; in general, we divide the day into utilitarian chunks, each with a set purpose. In a way, while this may seem limiting, for many of us it’s also a coping mechanism: Faced with an entirely blank canvas of time from now to the hour of our death, we might be terrified. In Catholic writings, the personal scale of the quotidian is known as “profane time”; its corollary, “sacred time,” is the yawning eternity that boggles the human brain. Historically, we have tended to farm out devotional practices that bring a person face to face with eternity to professional holy people, or those on a spiritual quest: monks, knights, mystics, seekers of all kinds.

In a world that moves at TikTok speed, it sometimes feels like anyone willing to read a book – for any length of time – is a sort of holy fool. “We have cool old Language poets and, like, Fluxus people,” the writer Walt John Pearce recently told Interview magazine. “Weird downtown socialites, losers, writers, prolific writers, weird writers, good writers, bad writers, personalities, hermits.” He was preparing for a 52-hour non-stop reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, which took place a month ago in New York and involved losers such as New Yorker book critic Merve Emre and short-story master Lydia Davis.

The works that attract the marathon treatment tend, like Stein’s and Joyce’s, to be the kind of books classed as “difficult.” This is sometimes for emotional or political reasons – recently, Toronto’s Theatre Centre hosted 24 hours of Palestinian poetry, and after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report came out in 2015, some organized durational readings of the executive summary. Often, however, marathon readings focus on works that are formally difficult. Personally, my bookmark has been stuck halfway through my copy of Ulysses for about 15 years. Reading aloud can be, in a sense, both an exercise of complete immersion in the book and a way to duck the arduous task of trying to understand it. Words keep churning past, carrying you along with their rhythms and momentum. You may not be exactly following the story, in the same way that someone shuffling their feet four months along in a contest may not be exactly dancing.

“Only a few dozen of Melville’s troubadours remained, many of them zonked in their own half-consciousness, heads smushed into pillows propped against chair backs, or cocked over on lovers’ shoulders,” Luke Winkie wrote in Slate of a Moby-Dick marathon earlier this year. “The room had the parched air of a cellblock, and yet, a steady stream of readers continued to plow through the doldrums of Moby-Dick, never dropping the pace.” Mr. Winkie wusses out, leaving the reading to get some sleep, but when he drops back in the next morning, the diehards are still going strong. “There was a lot of suffering, boredom, and repetition in antiquity,” one woman tells him. “There is something that our forefathers understood about doing something unpleasant to achieve a certain emotional state by the end of it. That’s what the marathon is for me.”

Then again, maybe even 52 straight hours of reading Gertrude Stein can’t change a person altogether. The writer Adharanand Finn journeyed to Japan in the early 2010s to try to meet one of the legendary “marathon monks” from a Buddhist order whose members try to reach enlightenment by running a thousand marathons in a thousand days, visiting mountain shrines along the way. When Mr. Finn finally met someone who had achieved this feat, the writer expected the monk to offer hard-won wisdom brought back from the outer limits of human endurance. Instead, the monk said the thousand marathons just gave him some time to think. Then he asked about Princess Di. “‘What do people think?’ he asks, leaning forward, watching me carefully. ‘Was it really an accident? I saw a television program about it, and it seemed to suggest some dark forces were in action, that she didn’t die in a simple accident. What do you think?’”

At the end of any self-contained episode, we are generally plunked back down into our ordinary lives, and the revelations of these sharp bursts of experience are hard to hold onto. Perhaps rather than expecting, like the main character in a novel, to emerge somehow different, anyone engaging in a marathon reading should expect the book itself to be the thing that changes. We burnish the work, rather than it burnishing us. The lavish application of our time thickens an invisible layer of the book’s influence: We’ve torn off a strip of our mortal lifetimes and added them to the sum of an artwork’s bid for eternity.