on recognition

or, what I learned from Sweeney Todd

I used to think Sweeney Todd was my least favorite Sondheim musical. What I’d always loved about Sondheim, after all, was the tension between his cynicism about human nature combined with his gentle love of people: the sorry/grateful that makes so much of his work so bittersweet. Sweeney Todd, brutal and bleak, with lyrics like “there’s a hole in the world like a great black pit / and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit,” and telling the story (with a book by Hugh Wheeler) of a revenge-driven “demon barber” who murders his victims and bakes them into meat pies, always felt like a curiously nihilistic entry in Sondheim’s oeuvre. Then I saw it again.

I had not remembered, the first time I saw it, how Sweeney Todd opens. Sweeney – formerly Benjamin Barker, unjustly accused of a crime by a corrupt judge who covets his wife Lucy, and sent to prison in Australia – has escaped and returned to London at last, rescued from a shipwreck by an idealistic young sailor, the fittingly-named Anthony Hope. Sweeney gruffly thanks Anthony for spotting him amid the flotsam, but Anthony denies any debt of gratitude. He has only done, he says, what any good Christian would have done. “There are millions of Christians who wouldn’t,” Sweeney says.

That’s when the beggar woman appears. Haggard, lascivious, and seemingly insane, she propositions Sweeney, who pushes her away without looking her in the face. He does, in other words, precisely what he has just accused the world’s hypocrites of not doing: failing to look at the person in need in front of him. And, in so doing, he sets into motion Sweeney Todd’s basic tragedy: that Sweeney corrodes his soul in revenge for a murder that never happened at all.

I’d remembered the outline of the plot: Sweeney goes back to his old barbershop to learn from Mrs. Lovett, the proximate proprietress of London’s worst pie shop, that in his absence his wife Lucy has been raped by Judge Turpin, that she has taken poison in her grief, and that she has – Mrs. Lovett implies – died, leaving Sweeney and Lucy’s daughter Johanna to be raised as Turpin’s ward. Sweeney seeks revenge on Turpin and his associates from the barber’s chair. When his plan goes awry – through the unintentional interference of Anthony Hope, who has since fallen in love with Johanna, whose identity he does not know – Sweeney decides instead to revenge himself on the whole world, blithely murdering anyone hapless enough to sit in his barber’s chair (and letting Mrs. Lovett profit off the meat), on the grounds that they probably deserve it. “No, we all deserve to die,” he sings, in a song called “Epiphany,” “Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why / Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief / For the rest of us death will be a relief.”

In his frenzy he plots to murder Anthony, too – never mind that he knows Johanna returns his love. It is only when he at last sees the face of the beggar woman – who winds up another of his victims after getting in the way – that he realizes Mrs. Lovett has fooled him. The beggar woman is Lucy: mad, but until recently alive. Everybody but Anthony, Johanna, and an urchin with disabilities named Toby (who kills Todd in revenge for his killing Lovett) winds up dead; everyone but the lovers winds up morally compromised.

But what I hadn’t remembered is that the plot does not, in fact, hinge on Judge Turpin’s crime, but on Sweeney’s. He fails to look his own wife in the face – as Anthony has looked at him – and so, he winds up killing her. (It’s worth noting that the first word of the musical commands us to “Attend”.) His crimes compound; at every point when he might choose truth, or forgiveness, or openness to grace (like, say, abetting Anthony and Johanna’s love), he chooses instead to see the world as a scatological ouroboros: where everybody consumes somebody, in one way or another, so we might as well get used to it.

J.M.W. Turner, Shields, on the River Tyne (1823), image courtesy of the Tate Britain, used under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The bleakness of the world is not a function of the narrative or musical frame (indeed, the world of Sweeney features, perhaps by intentional contrast, one of Sondheim’s most transcendently beautiful songs, “Johanna”, rendered all the lovelier by a discomfiting reprise, where the music blends with the Beggar Woman’s nigh-on-demonic “City on Fire,” and underscores some of Sweeney’s murders) but by Sweeney’s own misapprehension. He makes the world what it is. He loses Lucy and, subsequently Johanna – who in a climactic second-act scene he also fatally fails to recognize – not because he sees, cruel and clear-eyed, the world as it is (as I had falsely remembered), but because he does not see the truth as all.

Watching this revival of Sweeney got me thinking about the role of recognition in tragedy. Plenty of the tragedies that move me most do so at that moment Aristotle called anagnorisis: when Oedipus the Tyrant, say, realizes that he has inadvertently killed his father and married his mother, or Macbeth realizes Macduff, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”, is the one man who – according to a witch’s prophecy, at least – can defeat him. We realize our mistake too late. If we had but known in time, everything would be different.

But comedy, too, runs on misapprehension. What could be more quintessentially comic than mistaken identity – from Plautus’s twins to Shakespeare’s Viola and Sebastian? It would be easy to neatly divide comedy from tragedy by saying that the dividing line depends on whether the mistake is learned in time: whether it can be rectified in this life, leaving tragicomedy and problem plays  – Hermione’s fate in The Winter’s Tale, for example – as those in which the characters emerge alive, but too scathed to plausibly assure a happily ever after.

But there is another way to look at the dividing line: eschatologically. What will be revealed, when all is in fact revealed? When misapprehension dissolves into reality, is the truth better, or worse, than that which is revealed? What outcome is bleaker: a world in which Desdemona is unfaithful and justly accused, or a world in which she is innocent but still dead? A world in which Sweeney is right about human nature – or in which he is wrong: to his destruction, but our relief?

It is precisely that motion I find so moving – in Shakespeare and in Sondheim alike – the revelation that our own narrowness of vision, and not the capricious gods or brutal Nature, has led us out of trust, and out of love. Sweeney’s tale is a tragedy for Sweeney, but the world in which Sweeney lives is, at least marginally, a happier one than the world he thinks he lives in. The worst worlds are the ones we make from blindness, from selfishness, from feeding and fattening our darkest impulses in the certainty that everyone else is doing the same. We could have – we might still - do otherwise. In that, there is consolation: the same bittersweet quality I loved in Company and Into the Woods, restored to Sweeney through my own, hopefully somewhat improved, recognition.

It would be easy to say that anagnorisis involves revelation: that, in the case of tragedy, of a bleak world governed by uncaring gods, or else no gods at all. But I think that the revelation of eschatological anagnorisis – whether tragic or comic – is a little bit more complicated than that. The moral quality of the world as it is is intimately bound up with the moral quality of the world as we make it: our responses towards the former necessitate the latter. All our prophecies are, in this sense, self-fulfilling. The distinction between tragedy and comedy, in this respect, seems to me less important than the content of the final revelation: what kind of a world are we living in, and how wrong we have been about it.  

That wrongness – whether it is fixable or not by the play’s end – is inextricable from our own human nature: for all stories, in part, are about the stories we tell ourselves, and the asymptotic relationship between our self-understanding and the expansive nature of what is actually the case. In this, the recognition in anagnorisis resembles, at its best, the recognition not merely of one’s own wrongness, but of the polyphonic multiplicity of stories told by all other people, whose genres and worldviews and epiphanies and theologies can only ever upend our own: an upending that, at its best, is a form of love. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch – in her fiction and essays alike (and, as a writer, inevitably tragicomic) – sees human life as tending towards that precise recognition: that goodness must be found through the revelation of “unselfing”: that others’ reality is as real as our own. 

Sweeney has “City on Fire” and Sweeney’s dark “Epiphany.” But it also – though Sweeney cannot hear it – has “Johanna.”

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