Is all great art coincidental?
Why we ought to put more faith in the power of coincidence.
In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, we are told that for the symbologist Robert Langdon, “coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust.”
“Coincidence of pattern is one of the wonders of nature,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory. Although coincidences abound in his fiction, he was also conscious of the randomness of life. One of the protagonists in his novel Laughter in the Dark—a New York painter called Axel Rex—tells the story of a man who “once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” Coincidence, here, is another word for false expectation, contrivance, or cliché; it suggests a purpose and shape to life that doesn’t exist.
And yet, in telling us this absurd story of the cufflink and the fish, Nabokov emphasizes the importance of coincides for how we experience the world. The plausibility of a story depends on our belief in a coincidental relationship between words on a page, images on a canvas or screen, and the world beyond. Characters in novels meet serendipitously and plots are propelled by happenstance, just as they are in art and the movies. Or in life, where concurrences of events and circumstances often hint at deep patterns, even when there appear to be no obvious causal relationships.
Carl Jung was fascinated by the unsettling convergence of psychic and physical phenomena. He describes how during one of his psychotherapy sessions, a patient was in the middle of telling him about a dream she’d had in which she’d been given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a golden scarab beetle, when suddenly they were interrupted by a sound at the window. Jung turned around, startled, to find an insect knocking against the glass pane. He got up to open the window and caught the creature as it flew into the room. As he later wrote, the intruding insect was “the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.” Jung called this coincidental opening of a window onto the world “synchronicity,” a Greek word meaning a “falling together in time.”
One of my favorite coincidental literary moments occurs in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, a book based on a trip Sterne made through France and Italy in 1762. Arriving at his hotel in Paris, the narrator is told that the police have requested his passport. These are dangerous times to be traveling on the continent. The Seven Years’ War has not yet ended, and as an Englishman he risks arrest and imprisonment. The Reverend Yorick decides to travel to Versailles to acquire a passport with the mediation of an anglophile Count. Noticing a copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the Count’s bookshelf, the Englishman takes down the book and points at Yorick’s name in the text, mentioning that he is also called Yorick, like the character in the play. The Count takes this literally and assumes that the man standing before him really is Hamlet’s dead court jester. Impressed, the Count quickly procures Yorick a passport. After all, if you know any Shakespeare it’s likely to be the first scene of the final act of Hamlet, where the prince walks through a graveyard and picks up the freshly exhumed skull of the jester, intoning the words “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.”
Here, a coincidence (Yorick happens to be standing opposite a shelf with a play containing a character called Yorick) leads to a misunderstanding. Literature and life become ludicrously confused; they overlap but also conflict. The fictional Yorick in Sterne’s narrative is and is not the same Yorick who appears in Shakespeare; and while the fictional Yorick is a thinly veiled version of Sterne himself, he is also a literary creation.
This comic episode reminds us that coincidences are ambiguously situated between chance and fate, luck and providence. Also, that all great art—literature, music, painting, and sculpture—fabricates coincidence. It brings about unexpected new alignments and simulates accidental encounters, moments of sudden realization, when our interconnections with the world outside—the one on the other side of the window—are revealed.
The power of coincidence in art was brought home to me a few years ago, when my father was dying and I was reading Michael Jacobs’s book Everything Happens: Journey into a Painting about Velázquez’s Las Meninas, or ‘The Ladies in Waiting,’ which today hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Ostensibly, the painting is a celebration of royal power offering a view of the artist’s studio in the Royal Alcázar in Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain. Margarita, the Infanta, is shown with her maids of honor, while reflections of King Philip and Queen Mariana of Austria look down upon the scene from a mirror at the back of the room.
This may be a painting from the Spanish Golden Age, but as Jacobs reminds us, it’s also a work about dying. Velázquez himself would die in 1660, four years after he painted the picture. The King would die in 1665. At the time of the painting, Philip was already ill and defeated. At the conclusion of the Eighty Years’ War in 1648, Spain had been forced to recognize the new independent Dutch Republic.
And Jacobs was dying, too, when he wrote the book, which was left half-finished and completed posthumously by his friend, the journalist Ed Vulliamy. As it happened, Jacobs’s love of Spain, which had set him on this journey to uncover the enigmatic history of Las Meninas, had been stimulated as a teenager at school—the same school that I had attended. We’d sat on the same benches and gnarled refectory tables allegedly repurposed from the wood of the ships retrieved after the Spanish Armada was wrecked in 1588—the fleet sent to conquer England by Philip II, the grandfather of Velázquez’s patron who is dimly reflected in the mirror in Las Meninas.
In the book, Jacobs is preoccupied by the coincidences that have led him to the painting, from an out-of-the-blue letter with a cut-up postcard of Las Meninas sent to him by a schoolfriend to the fact that he shares a birthday with Foucault (the author of an influential essay on Las Meninas) and the coincidence that Foucault died at the same age that Velázquez began the painting—not to mention “the realisation that the word ‘meaning’ was nearly an anagram of Meninas.” “Nothing in life,” Jacobs writes, “happens purely by chance.”
It’s the mysterious, black-clad character who stands in an illuminated doorway in the background of Velázquez’s group portrait that captivates Jacobs. Who is he and what is he doing? Is he coming, or is he going? It turns out, by coincidence, that the man is probably a real historical figure, a chamberlain called Velázquez like the artist, except he is no relation. This ‘other’ Velázquez—the black-clad figure, not the artist—can be seen as a harbinger of death, a valedictory figure, reminding Jacobs of his own imminent demise. But he can also be viewed as angel-like, standing as he does in an illuminated doorway, an affirmation of eternal life—“a refuge from the disintegrating world.” The greatness of Las Meninas, then, resides in its ability to produce coincidences and open windows. The painting’s meaning shifts to meet us as we stand before it in the messiness and fragility of our life on the other side.