If you are a parent and are thinking of introducing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to your children come bath time, be advised of the following:
- Herman’s brother’s name was Gansevoort. Gansevoort Melville. If you have happen to have siblings sharing a bath, perhaps consider asking, “Who wants to be The Gansevoort?” If one child replies in the affirmative, ask them a Ganesvoort is. With any luck -- or, perhaps, some -- they might give you an answer that sounds like some sort of Tove Jansson drawing coming to life.
- This is about creating a stepping stone towards a world of adventure. This is not about recreating The Truman Show.
- Ask them: “Is there a Great Whale in the sky? In outer space?” See how they interpret the need to reduce evil to a synecdochal metaphor today.
- Melville once travelled from Buffalo to Chicago via steam boat, taking note of the “continual stream of Venetianly corrupt” life they saw along the way. Be sure to factor this into your improvisations accordingly.
- Feel free to bring Herman’s own language into your improvisations as well. Take note of phrases like, “ … the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic geneologies,” (but pass over the bits where sailors might fondle a carving of a woman’s leg they made)
- Ask them how they might decide to stow away in a vessel. (If they were ever so inclined.)
- Leave the room for a moment when you discover the fact that Sylvester Graham’s lectures were on a ship Melville once sailed on and that Graham crackers were invented by a man named Sylvester Graham in the 19th century who marketed these crackers for their ”anti-aphrodisiac properties,” as you just can’t believe it and have to tell your partner. (Eagle-eyed readers will have probably spotted the fact by now that I’ve been relying upon Andrew Delbanco’s biography so far.)
- Show them a clip of Doctorow and Atwood debating the meaning of the book. Ask your kid who had the better argument and why and where the urgency of each particular argument might have come from from each author.
- Before they get up out of the bath and head out into the world, hopefully reading the book along the way, read them the following, which comes from one of Melville’s lectures --
“For the profit of travel … you get rid of a few prejudices … The Spanish matador, who devoutly believes in the proverb ‘Cruel as a Turk,’ goes to Turkey, sees that people are kind to all animals; sees docile horses, never balky, gentle, obedient, exceedingly intelligent, yet never beaten; and comes home to his bull fights with a very different impression of his own humanity. The stock-broker goes to Thessalonica and finds infidels more honest than Christians; the teetotaller finds a country in France where all drink and no one gets drunk; the prejudiced against color finds several hundreds millions of people of all shades of color and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice … In the adornment of our houses, frescoes have taken the places of dead white. God is liberal of color; so should man be … Travel to a large and generous nature is as a new birth.”