John Sheehy was visited in his office by his former Plan student Robyn Manning-Samuels ’14 to discuss Melville, movie violence, and the “passing” novel. Really it was a pretense for Robyn to play with John’s puppy, Eddie, but they did talk about those things as well. 

John Sheehy: Eddie’s an experiment in dog training. The thing all the trainers are saying now is positive reinforcement. So either he’s going to be an extremely well-trained dog or he’s just going to be like fat as a tick (laughs), because he’s getting treats like every minute.

Robin Manning-Samuels: Why do you get all the fun Plans? All the ones with video games and comic books?

JS: I don’t think I do get all the fun Plans. I mean, I get fun Plans but I think they’re all pretty fun. Could I be interviewed lying down? Is that okay?

RMS: What are you reading these days?

JS: Right now I’m not reading anything much for work, because it’s June. June for me is sort of a big decompression stage. Eddie…Just give him something to chew…or you can just ignore him.

RMS: If you can!

JS: But soon I will have to start reading very large post-modern novels for John Pennington’s Plan. And then I’ve got to figure out…I’m doing a thing on the “passing” novel. It’s actually a genre. It turns out it’s one of the enduring genres of American literature. The original ones were about people who were passing for “white.” Get the air quotes? Please? It actually began before the Civil War. There was a real cultural preoccupation with passing, because race, even as it was constructed before the civil war, was really problematic. And the way the culture worked it out was by just fantasizing these passing narratives over and over again.

RMS: So passing is pretending you’re something else?

JS: That’s sort of the question. After the Civil War you get this big spate of novels, or cultural productions, whatever. They’re written by white people. They’re written by black people. They’re written by multiracial people, or whatever. And very often, the sort of primary moment in these stories will be a moment where a child looks in a mirror and sees usually a white face. They have white skin, they have all the physical markers of whiteness. But that child is usually looking in the mirror at the exact moment when someone out in the world has revealed to the child that they’re not white, that they’re black. And so, the question that the child has to deal with is what does it mean to be white or black. Because in terms of physical markers everything about them suggests that they’re white, and in terms of social markers they are apparently black, whatever that means. They’re the only people in the culture that have reason to question, what does it mean? Eddie….Eddie…

RMS: Is there a passing novel I’d be familiar with?

JS: Well, Nella Larsen’s Passing. Eddie…c’m’ere. Can you hand me that chew toy? The Great Gatsby is a passing novel, really. The Great Gatsby is about a man who is pretending to be something that he is not. But what he is and what he is not, what the level of deception is, is an open question. Interestingly enough, Gatsby the novel comes out right at the height of passing novels, as a genre. And Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby can’t really talk about Gatsby without talking about race. Tom Buchanan is just consumed with theories about race. He’s worried about the rise of the colored empire. So when he calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” that’s like the classic gesture of the passing novel. There are clear lines between people, and Gatsby is challenging those lines. The fact that he’s challenging them suggests that there aren’t actually clear lines between people. And the fact that there aren’t clear lines is so threatening to the established order of things it makes everybody nervous. So it is an enduring genre. The last of the straightforward passing novels came out in 1998. It’s called Caucasia. Did you read Caucasia?

RMS: No, but there’s a comic called Incognegro.

JS: It’s never gone away because race as a preoccupation of American life has never gone away. And race, especially the binary about blackness and whiteness, seems to most people to be just something to be relied upon. We rely on that idea, but in fact, for a lot of people, it can’t be relied upon at all. A lot of people’s lives are lived in a place that is undefined by that binary. And there’s actually a big part of the culture that’s preoccupied with what you do in that place. But it is kind of interesting that they are sort of invisible in the mainstream culture. Until you start looking for it, and then you realize that the most popular book of the 19th century was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was about, among other things, two characters who were passing as white. They not only had escaped slavery, they were physically “white” enough—again, catch the air quotes. They were physically white enough to go to the north and just sort of pass into the white population. And even for Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was against slavery, the idea that black people could be passing for white was still like, “what do we do with this?” Because race was taking on a sort of cultural burden that before had been helped by slavery.

RMS: So this is a class your teaching this fall?

JS: Yeah. Years ago I had actually written and published about the passing novel, so it was one of my original preoccupations. I’ve taught courses on race at Marlboro, pretty much from the beginning, but I’ve never really just zeroed in on the passing novel as a genre. And so it’s going to be an American lit course. I’ll probably teach Gatsby.

RMS: Awesome.

JS: At the time I published about it, the black-white binary was the thing that we talked about. Since then that binary, even to the extent that you can talk about that binary, is sort of on a continuum with 10 or 15 other binaries, that are also not binaries. So the landscape, racially, is still something you can talk about with respect to passing, and one end of the binary is always the same, oddly enough. There’s the white-Latino binary, there’s the white-black binary, there’s the white-Asian binary, but the undiscussed category in all those binaries is whiteness. And whiteness exists because of all those others. So the real question that the passing novel raises is what does it mean to be white? Because all of those other things are defined in opposition to whiteness.  

I’m sorry, this is just kind of on my mind right now. Passing novels were for a long time categorized in African American literature, which is kind of interesting in itself. But one of the great passing novels was by this writer called Charles Chesnutt, who was one of the founders of the NAACP. He was also a guy who could have passed if he wanted to, but chose not to. He wrote a novel called The House Behind the Cedars, which is about a brother and a sister. Both of them are black in the sense that one out of eight of their grandparents was black. And so they were both outwardly, physically white. Both of them have a mother who considers herself to be a negro. The male character in that book was born John Walden, and he changes his name to John Warwick when he decides to pass. He has this great conversation in the middle where he he’s talking to a judge—he studied the law, and he’s a very smart man—he is talking to the man who had been his mentor for all his life. The guy he’s talking to, who was white, keeps saying, well, you know, this is all about heritage. It’s about denying yourself, about something deep inside you. And John Walden says no, it’s not, it’s really just about the law. If I stay in North Carolina I’m black. But if I move 200 miles away to Virginia, I’m not black. I’m not. Because the law says you’re black here if you’re one eighth. The law there says you’re only black if you’re one quarter. So, I’m going to go some place where I can be white, because there are privileges attached to being white, and I’m not going to deny them to myself. And even for Chesnutt, who’s writing this novel, that’s a really compelling argument. Why not be white—what are you holding onto and what are you moving towards? And oddly enough, this conversation happens about a third of the way through the novel, and after that this really compelling character moves to Virginia and just disappears from the novel (laughs). One of the main characters is gone. And it’s weird, just in terms of plot, that Chesnutt doesn’t bring him back. He dissolves into the emptiness of whiteness, and can never be brought back, whereas his sister, who is faced with a similar choice, ends up passing for a while and then feels so consumed with sort of guilt or something, that she has to go back. And she moves back into the black world.  Where in a lot of ways she doesn’t fit. But she does it because that is deemed to be right. All of these novels are weird because you realize pretty quickly that there is no good answer to the problem that confronts these people. And it’s not an uncommon problem. What are you eating?

RMS: It’s a green smoothie.

JS: That’s disgusting. Is that a magic bullet?

RMS: Yeah, I have a magic bullet in here. It’s like spinach, cucumber, celery… What else are you teaching, I’m sure you’re doing lots of tutorials.

JS: Well I’m doing a writing seminar on film. I haven’t done a strictly film course in quite a while. Did I ever do film violence when you were here?

RMS: No.

JS: I used to have this course that was one of my go-to courses, that everybody took, called Film Violence. I stopped teaching it after a number of times. It’s really hard to teach. It’s just hard. You’re dealing with extreme violence, so you’re dealing with trigger warnings. You kind of have to watch the film, but some of the films…there was a period between 1968 and 1975, when American films just exploded into violence. They call it the ultra violent period. Part of that has to do with the fact that the Hays code, which had governed representations of violence, sort of dissolved in 1968. And another part of it has to do with the fact that the Vietnam War was being televised, so a lot of directors in the industry were interested in the problem of violence. And they were also repulsed by depictions of violence that made it look like something that wasn’t violent. So you got all these directors, like Peckinpah, Scorcese, Kubrick, and others, who just became really interested in portraying violence as a sort of social phenomenon. And so you get all these movies that are just really hard to watch, even at this remove. Like Taxi Driver is not an easy movie to watch. So, I used to teach that a lot, and I couldn’t do it after a while. It’s emotionally difficult to teach it. You were always kind of negotiating stuff that you don’t have to negotiate, so I pulled away from film for a while. I’ve set up a new film course for the fall that I think is going to have some of the same stuff in it. I haven’t decided how it’s going to be set up, but it’s going to be about morality tales and how people construct moral choices.

RMS: Sounds really good.

JS: And it’s going to have Taxi Driver, and it’s going to have Shane (laughs).

RMS: It has to have Shane. Yes.

JS: Every course has to have Shane (laughs). Because I think Shane is like the American proto-myth. If you can understand what’s going on in Shane, which is a messed up movie—it’s just weird on every level—you will see the basis for American culture for the next 40 years after. It just keeps coming back to the same—I don’t know, what would you call it…

RMS: I feel like they all come back to the same justification for their mythic narrative around morality.

JS: Which is basically: the guy who’s doing the killing, is a good man.

RMS: Always.

JS: …for reasons you can’t quite pin down, because he’s killing a lot of people (laughs). But once you’ve established that he’s a good man on some core level, it’s entirely distinct from the things he does. That he is good; then you will allow him to do any kind of horrific kind of violence.

RMS: He will be indistinguishable, almost, from the villain. Other than it’s established that they are just bad. In some smarter movies, they’ll point out that that distinction doesn’t exist, except arbitrarily. Taxi Driver kind of does that.

JS: Well even in Shane. The bad guy, Ryker, constantly meets Shane and is like, what are you doing in those clothes? You’re not a farmer man, you’re like us. In their big showdown, there’s this conversation where Shane is like, I know I’m like you, but I know our time is over. And now I’m going to kill everybody in this room.

RMS: And he kills like 20 people.

JS: While a little boy watches.

RMS: While a little boy watches, and roots for him. And then he walks off into the sunset.

JS: He may or may not be dead.

RMS: He may or may not be dead.

JS: With the little boy begging him to come back. Saying, mother wants you (laughs). My obsession with Shane has become kind of kind of infamous, among my colleagues. But that movie explains a lot.

RMS: And what book are you obsessed with?

JS: I have this enduring obsession with Moby Dick. That’s on my mind because I just taught it.

RMS: You love Moby Dick.

JS: Why do you think I like it so much?

RMS: Because you’re smart. There’s an endless amount of things going on in Moby Dick, and it’s rewarding to constantly go back and take another look at it. To teach it it’s probably even more rewarding. When I taught my class I knew all those books back and forth, but then getting feedback, getting other perspectives, getting correlations and all those things just makes it that much more interesting.With something like Moby Dick there’s just endless amounts of payoff, if you give it time.

JS: When you teach a book, you interact with it in a way that’s a lot more intense than when you just read a book, or even you’re learning a book. Part of its just that you have to go into a room full of people who are confused by it, and you’re responsible for knowing it—in a way that you don’t necessarily know it if you’re just reading it for pleasure. When you teach a book, and this is true of many books that I love, there are many books that you can find the bottom of. You teach it once, you teach it twice, you teach it 10 times, and in the end of that you’ve found the edges of it, you know all of the things that are in it. And Moby Dick is not like that. I’ve been teaching it for 20 years and every time I teach it…there’s a bottom somewhere there but I haven’t found it. It’s a beautiful book.

But the thing that’s interesting about American literature is the way it sets itself up for failure. The American writers that we canonize, the ones that we come back to, are all people who, in some way or another, set out to write a Bible. Their ambitions were that grand. They were not usually like, “I’m going to write the social novel of the 1890s,” although there were people doing that. But people like Melville, or Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickenson—or a modern person like Marilynne Robinson—you pick up those books and its as of this person is trying to rewrite literature, all of the way back to the ground. And you can’t. You fail of course. All of those texts that I’m thinking of have pretty major failings. Like quite often they just kind of fall apart, or they don’t know how to end, or they do end, but they end in strange ways. But the thing that’s fascinating about it is this insane ambition that I think is part of the American character. To just rewrite history. To start fresh and build some brand new edifice, one that has a relationship to the old edifice but is huge. Moby Dick is actually very referential to the bible, but its also rewriting the relationship between the human being and the universe, or it’s trying to. And all the best parts if it are parts where you just recognize that and go, oh, this is opening some entirely new door. And all of the worst parts of it are like, ah, for crying out loud (laughs). This is so serious, can we just go kill a whale? It’s been quite a while (laughs).

RMS: It’s full of whaling facts. What about that scene where the guy goes down inside the whale’s head?

JS: Yeah, it’s just on the edge of being silly. The guy goes down into the whale’s head, which becomes this metaphor for getting lost in the head. Melville says, how many men have been lost in Plato’s honeyed head. But at the same time this guy is literally drowning in this tub of oil. And the whale’s head is submerged, so he’s in the whales head, which itself is in the sea. And one of the harpooners sees the problem, jumps into the ocean, swims out with like a sword, and cuts open the whale’s head, and pulls him out, in this birth scene. This guys being born from the head of the whale. It’s right on the edge of being ridiculous. Except it’s not. Melville is really into is like the factual world is just pregnant with meaning (pun apparently unintended). You can never tell what anything means but you feel this sense that there’s just meaning everywhere. And so he loves to give you this sort of set of facts and then just spin the metaphors out of it. I forget what the question was (laughs).

RMS: Okay, we know what book you’re obsessed with, and you’re obsessed with Shane. What else?

JS: Lately I’ve been obsessed with trying to get a piece of my own published. It’s just so hard right now.

RMS: A story?

JS: I don’t know what you’d call it, narrative non-fiction. I guess it’s a memoir, a piece about the death of my mother. It sort of incorporates things that are fiction. And I think it’s good, but it’s too long. As it turns out the worst thing to get is an encouraging denial. When a journal sends back and says boy, we really loved this, but we’re not going to publish it (laughs).

RMS: So you’re sending it to literary magazines?

JS: Yeah literary magazines, academic journals. It’s gone through several iterations. The first version of it was 13,000 words.

RMS: Wow, that’s almost a book.

JS: That’s the problem. It’s almost a book, but it’s not a book. A journal’s not going to pick it up at that point. So, in order to make it seriously considered by a journal I had to cut 3,000 words out of it. I had to get it down to 10,000, which is still pretty long. But there are a lot more journals that will consider a 10,000-word piece than will consider a 13,000-word piece. So I got it down. It took me three months to cut those words out.

RMS: You loved them all.

JS: Yeah, and they left these big holes that I had to figure out how to putty up with more words (laughs). I learned a lot from that exercise. It took a lot longer than I had intended. So now the 10,000-word version is out, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

RMS: That’s awesome. I’ve got to go.

JS: This is what he needs (referring to Eddie, asleep under the coffee table). Not the play part, but just to realize that it’s all right to just relax. He just likes to be under this coffee table.

RMS: It’s like the cutest thing ever.