Here is a song, about stealing and gluttonously consuming sweets, that makes people cry: “The Recognition Scene” by the Mountain Goats.
The song gets its pathos from straddling past and future, fondly remembering anecdotes from an epic three-month candy crime spree and turning ahead in the chorus to a time of loss. The past, however, stubbornly refuses to give any clues to the future. Why will “you” be gone? We don’t have enough pieces to put together a definitive answer to that question. We may like to wonder about it, to toy with possibilities like we’re eating candy: are they going to jail, or leaving the country, or dying? We can entertain these possibilities freely, but not settle on one. You might say we… can’t break the code?
Another mystery: what is the recognition here? We have Darnielle’s explanation, in his book This Year, that the title comes from the theory of tragedy and refers to the moment when “the hero understands that he’s too deep in the machinery–the specific machinery of tragedy–to escape it alive.” But that’s no help. This “hero” doesn’t seem to expect to die; in fact, they expect to live a forlorn, perhaps painfully long life without “the only love [they]’ve ever known.” They certainly don’t meet the classic tragic criterion of being “good, but not preeminently good.” They’re just a feckless candy thief.
And why does the song keep repeating the same line?
I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.
I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.
This doesn’t look like much on the page. And it breaks any realistic interpretation of the song as a speech directed at a lover. If they were speaking, they would wait to see how the other person responds, not repeat themselves. You may say that’s just something songs do. Fine. Then I will ask, why do songs do that? Why does this one?
What is happening to us as we listen to this song? We inhabit two perspectives: because we are listening, we take on the position of the lover being addressed; at the same time, the story-telling mode invites us to identify with the hero, because that’s what we do when we hear a story. We take on both these positions without knowing much at all about either of them.
This song is only a scene, not a whole tragedy, nor is it conventionally tragic. We drop in without all the context and without the benefit of the tragic formula, and we try to make shift. No sooner do we get a little orientation than we are thrown ahead without explanation into a moment of recognition about the future and held there. The repetition of the line (and of the same three beguiling chords) poetically expands that moment, prying it open so we can linger on it.
If you like this song, it’s probably because you feel something on the chorus. I can’t tell you what you’re feeling, but maybe you’ll recognize this: the anticipation of loss happens in a place outside of time; the past, present, and future are all wrapped together in a moment that does not simply arise and pass away but abides. This moment of recognition about the future, which is happening now, was already there on the surface of things in the remembered anecdote about the getaway car in the second verse:
I saw something written in tall, clear letters on your face,
but I could not break the code.
What the hero is seeing now was already published plainly as can be in the past they are remembering. You may disagree, but there is some irony, I think, in the hero’s observation that they couldn’t make head or tails of it. How can you not read what’s written large, loud, and right on the surface?
Only in the tragic cloud of unknowing does this happen. The tragic hero does not see what’s happening, even if it’s in plain sight, until the moment of what the Greeks called anagnorisis (making-known-again), which is not a revelation but a kind of un-un-seeing. Oedipus knew exactly what he was going to have done–the Oracle told him–but he does not see himself doing it, doesn’t know he has done it until the recognition scene.
What is peculiar is that in watching Oedipus Rex, we know the key things that Oedipus doesn’t, but in listening to “The Recognition Scene,” our situation is the opposite: everything we want to know is withheld from us, leaving the anagnorisis floating almost free by itself, as if that were possible.
That’s a neat trick, and I think it’s Darnielle’s invention in this song. I’m not saying he invented holding back key details. That’s not just in this song, and others have done it centuries before him. What’s new here is deploying this device to reverse a classic discursive structure. Sorry for saying “discursive structure” in a book club, by the way. I know that’s gauche. But I promise I’m not trying to show off my booklearning; “discursive structure” is just the only thing I know to call it when I’m talking about the shape of the relationship between participants in discourse (like an author and an audience, for example).
The classic discursive structure from Ancient Greek tragedy is one of dramatic irony: the audience already knows what the hero is going to recognize. In Darnielle’s invented anti-tragic form, the hero recognizes what the audience still wants to know.
Still, after all that, and recognizing the folly of asking, I have some questions:
- How is stealing candy thematically appropriate? Adults committing a child’s sin? Something about What does that have to do with anagnorisis?
- How much should we actually be thinking of the paradigm of Oedipus? Are there other tragic models we should consider?
- Is there somewhere else we should be sharing thoughts and questions like these? We don’t want to show up a month late and claim ownership of a book club space that’s already more public than what we’re offering. YouTube doesn't seem to be a good forum for long-form writing. (By the way, in this phrasing, we’re channeling the spirit of a man who would sit down alone and say, “Hi, we’re the Mountain Goats.”)
- If there isn’t such a space, is anyone interested in joining this one? I don’t think I have it in me to write one of these every day. Let me know if you want to join forces!
