Spontaneity & Contrivance as One
By Eli Siegel

rt has always been spontaneity and contrivance. It was so in Pompeii and it is so in action painting. We fling as we study. We have impulses as we ponder. We have an unconscious as we know. There is material in us unlooked at. It might be good to look at it.

     It would be fairly correct to say that art is contrived spontaneity or spontaneous contriving. At least, art can't do without spontaneity and it can't do without contrivance. According to the Theory of Opposites, we spontaneously get glimpses of what is "contrived" or just or orderly in us; and we work in an orderly way with the material in us as unformed, as insistent, as spontaneous. There is not only a relation between the spontaneous and contrived in us; there is a constant motion between them, an unceasing reciprocity in manyness.

     The spontaneous artist hardly began with Jackson Pollock. Spontaneity has been an ageless possession of life itself—of man, of what is around. Existence without impulse, the shooting forth spontaneously into space or anywhere, would be miserably deprived. You can say, resoundingly: Existence is spontaneity. But within the spontaneity is a plan, order. When Whitman in his preface to Leaves of Grass talks of the "leaning sunflower," he implies there is some sense to the leaning of the sunflower. The leaping of a wave is not unreasonable. The swaying of a twig, spontaneous as it is, has in it a touch of law.

The Renaissance Had Spontaneity

he Renaissance had some spontaneous people. Notable among these is the Venetian Tintoretto. Vasari, writing while Tintoretto was still working, shows his astonishment at the impulsiveness of the remembered Venetian:

He surpassed himself with new and extraordinary inventions, the creations of his intellect, and worked at hazard, without design, as if to show that this art is a trifle. He sometimes left his finished sketches so gross that the pencil-strokes possess more vigour than design and judgment, and seem to have been made by chance. He has painted practically every kind of picture in fresco and portraits in oils at every price, and in this way he has done and is still doing most of his painting in Venice.¹

Vasari sounds a bit alarmed; and it has often happened that the artist who is opulently, speedily, surprisingly spontaneous has alarmed the man of sobriety and measure. In this way, Balzac—somewhat like Tintoretto— alarmed Sainte-Beuve; as did Dumas and Eugène Sue, writers different from Balzac, but similar in their being fearfully busy and abundant in showing it.

       Tintoretto clearly was spontaneous and various. Still, it should be seen that if that was all he was, he would not be as alive as he is. We don't go with Ruskin, who described Tintoretto's Paradise as "by far the most precious work of art of any kind whatsoever, now existing in the world."² Ruskin is not a hero of criticism in these severe days, but without Ruskin we can see that there is much composing work, much thought in the Paradise and other paintings of the industrious Venetian.

      Spontaneity and composition, impulse and arduous thought are at one in Tintoretto. In Tintoretto, impulse and arduous thought are at one in keeping with him; in other artists, impulse and thought are at one in keeping with them.

The Art of India

The art of India has often been described as a whole in terms a good deal like those Vasari used about Tintoretto. We may use some phrases or sentences from the fairly authoritative L'Art indien, l'art chinois, published in Paris under the direction of Henry Martin. The specific writer, whose name is not given, says in the section "General Qualities":

      Well, if there is a " frenzy" in Indian art and "a defiance to logic," where's the art? Apparently it's there, or the handbook mentioned would not have been written. Consequently, there must be something besides "frenzy" and "a defiance to logic" in the Hindu work. That something is composition—nevertheless; some order—nevertheless; thought—nevertheless. Composition, order, thought can happen differently, but they happen.

      The thought in Indian art is complex, multitudinous, beyond a line; but thought about a jungle is as much thought as thought about one nymph and one pillar in the Peloponnesus.

      Reason itself has its excesses. Intellect can be melodramatic and bewilderingly heterogeneous. If it is that, intellect resembles Indian art.

The Unconscious & Reason

he unconscious is related to spontaneity. I don't think that Sigmund Freud was adequate on the unconscious; yet while Freud did not give the unconscious all it has, while he saw it narrowly, he did see it as having direction. When the unconscious represses something, it quite clearly has a purpose; and where there is a purpose, and an omission to attain that purpose—the purpose being "repression"—there is thought. This is what Freud himself says in the following sentence:

I know that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of directing ideas, can occur as little in the realm of hysteria and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams.⁴

Certainly, if there are "directing ideas" in the thought taking place in "the realm of hysteria and paranoia," there must be a closeness between the unconscious and reason, a closeness between spontaneity and order. Freud is saying, in fact, that in their terms hysteria and paranoia have order, go for it. The implication of this is large.

     Freud says, too:

Freud is writing of the pathological, but if "complex mental operations" can take place without consciousness in the mind of a sadly awry person, certainly reason and the unconscious can be at one elsewhere; that is, be present at the same time, and work for one objective, rise from a common source.

Shakespeare, on Nature & Art

nce, the unconscious was included under "nature"—the unconscious in its central sense. People had a way some hundreds of years ago of seeing "nature" as busily working in the minds of men and elsewhere to produce good situations, handsome results— and also, as with Lady Macbeth and Richard III, some bad ones.

     Among the people who long ago saw nature as reasonable, as having a plan, as being at one with art, was Shakespeare. Perhaps the most noted reconciliation of nature and art, spontaneity and consciousness, impulse and plan is in these lines from The Winter's Tale—Polixenes is talking to Perdita, who has been giving her mind to flowers. [The word mean in the passage means method.]

                             Say there be;
Yet Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. [4.4]

We are in the grand world of Shakespearean verse and Perdita and flowers, but these Elizabethan or Jacobean lines say something cohering with what Freud said later. Plan and spontaneity, for good or evil, for a personal or impersonal cause, exist at once and explain each other. And the words of Polixenes comment valuably on Tintoretto and on the abandonment of Indian art hundreds of years ago.

Goethe Sustains Shakespeare

Goethe, in a sonnet of 1802, "Natur und Kunst," sustains Shakespeare as to the oneness of nature and art, spontaneity and order. Goethe in German uses the same words Shakespeare uses in English—nature and art. The relations of Natur und Kunst centrally mattered with the German romantics; and they mattered with English, French, Italian, Russian romantics. (Pushkin and Lermontov's lives commented on Natur und Kunst.)

     I quote some lines from Goethe's sonnet:

And both seem equally to draw me to them...
And when we first, in considered hours,
Have bound ourselves, with spirit and eagerness, to art,
Nature, free, can once more glow in our hearts...

Who wishes to be great, must gather himself precisely;
The master first shows himself in restriction,
And only law can give us freedom.⁵

     It will be seen from Goethe's lines that the problem of spontaneity and contrivance, impulse and thought, is related to the permeating problem of Freedom and Discipline. It is likely that if—as Goethe says—law becomes one with "nature, free" when art is honored, spontaneity and contrivance will also be in a state of oneness.

Walt Whitman Too

Whitman found art in the spontaneous ways of animals and plants and all else. If there was anybody who saw spontaneity and plan as one, it was the author of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Here is what he says in the preface to Leaves of Grass:

To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.⁶

These words are Shakespearean, Goethean, Coleridgean, but they have in them the 1855 Whitman quality, the Whitman historical specificity.

     The poet blithely goes on unifying the way of the poet with graygulls, blood horses, sunflowers, moon and sun. And these are reality's successes as spontaneity and form as one.

You shall not contemplate the flight of the graygull over the bay or the mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven or the appearance of the moon afterward with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him.

     Yet Whitman was interested in prosody. Words well arranged were along with the "leaning sunflower" in bright, thoughtful reality.

     The musical poetic line, the well-made poetic line, in Whitman's mind went with "the appearance of the sun."

     It could not be otherwise, for in accordance with the Theory of Opposites, what art sees by means of an individual, is Reality already being, having, and showing Spontaneity and Contrivance. And if reality shows Spontaneity and Contrivance, every instance of reality does.    

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