Before we were readers, we were trackers.
A brief history of reading via bear prints, a painting, and other incidental details.
I’d just finished reading Don DeLillo’s novel The Names when, at the beginning of February, we found paw marks in the snow, a trail from the forest across the front lawn to the road. They weren’t those of our dog, or the cloven prints of a white-tailed deer, or those distinctive elongated depressions left by cottontails and snowshoe hares. Was it a bear? I wasn’t sure, so I did a YouTube search and with the help of a bear identification video from Yellowstone was able to confirm that they were indeed black bear prints. And sure enough, sometime later we saw the creature ambling out of the forest past the front door.
In the novel—one of DeLillo’s best to my mind—the protagonist and his son discuss the origin of the word “character” from a Greek word meaning “to sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave.” In time it came to denote a “distinctive differentiating mark” before acquiring its contemporary meanings: a disposition, temperament, dramatis personae, letter, or symbol. I thought of that passage in DeLillo as I studied those impressions in the snow. Because they, too, were characters.
My cluelessness when it comes to animal prints isn’t surprising, given I grew up in a city. But even the country folk in these parts, keen hunters that they are, often fail when it comes to the tracking test. When I asked a neighbor what animal he thought we were dealing with, he replied with an evasive shrug “maybe a coyote or a bobcat.” After all, it was February and black bears aren’t supposed to emerge from their winter dens until March or April. But the fact is most of us can no longer read the signs of the critters around us. And although this may seem incidental—why do we need to, when there’s YouTube?—it’s worth remembering that once our survival depended on our tracking literacy. We used to read to stay alive.
When we bent down to decrypt the paw marks in the snow, it felt a bit like deciphering a foreign script. This isn’t an analogy that’s as far-fetched as you might think. The historian Carlo Ginzburg has suggested that written language may have its origins in the decoding of animal tracks. “In the course of endless pursuits,” he writes, “hunters learned to construct the appearance and movements of an unseen quarry through its tracks—prints in soft ground, snapped twigs, droppings, snagged hairs or feathers, smells, puddles, threads of saliva. They learnt to sniff, to observe, to give meaning and context to the slightest trace. They learnt to make complex calculations in an instant, in shadowy wood or treacherous clearing.”
As we crouched and prodded those five-toed indentations perhaps we were unknowingly rehearsing an ancient meaning-making ritual. Or rather, the prints were reactivating a latent but long-buried capacity in us for reading the natural world. If our snowy front lawn was the page, the bear trail was a message, a pictogram in the wild. Ginzburg alludes to a Chinese tradition that claims writing was invented by an official who took inspiration from the footprints left by deer in a sandy riverbank.
The most evocative painting to feature tracks and trackers is probably Pieter Bruegel’s ‘The Hunters in the Snow,’ which shows us three dejected-looking hunters trudging through the snow with a pack of hounds. Judging from their meagre catch—a mangy fox hangs from the back of one of the men—their hunting trip hasn’t been much of a success. In the foreground, the prints of a rabbit or hare are visible. What does this mess of human and dog prints, and the rabbit trail, like a path to nowhere on the hill, mean? By the time Bruegel produced the work in 1565, the printing press had taken off in Europe, with pamphlets and books reaching an ever-growing readership. In this new age of reading—of tracking words across a page—did the significance of animal tracks begin to change, perhaps even diminish? In Bruegel’s painting the black letters on a tilting inn sign in the background seem to echo the slanted prints of the elusive prey. The painting gives us writing and tracks, the world as a story strewn with enigmatic, God-given clues.
In his 1972 masterpiece Solaris, the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky includes a memorable scene with Bruegel’s ‘Hunters.’ The camera breaks the painting into a series of miniature vignettes as it zooms in on details, tracking from the rabbit prints to the slouching hunters, from the birds to the miniature figures in the background. By withholding the wide shot, we’re invited to read the work through an accumulation of details, even as the absence of the single shot makes interpretation impossible.
My cursory online induction into the art of tracking, inspired by those bear paw marks, got me thinking about how we follow tracks in literature. What distinguishes the open-air decipherment of animal prints from the reading of a book is the way we process the details. As Ginzburg points out, tracking an animal involves “the minute examination of the real, however trivial, to uncover the traces of events which the observer cannot directly experience.” If you’re a hunter and misread or fail to follow the tracks (is that what Bruegel’s dejected hunters have done?), you’ll end up starving or possibly as meat for a predator.
Often, it’s descriptions of apparently ancillary details, rather than the plot of a book, that stay in my mind. Why, for example, do I remember the scene in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers when Gertrude Morel listens with irritation to “the eager scratch of the steel comb against the side of the bowl” as her gruff husband wets his hair? Or in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, why am I stuck with the detail of the gravedigger and beadle who grows potatoes in the cemetery at Yonville? Or going much further back to the Odyssey, an oral epic, why are we told that the key Penelope uses to open a storeroom has an ivory handle, or that Odysseus’s clothes are stored in a scented chest?
What do these details amount to? In his 1968 essay, ‘The Reality Effect,’ the French cultural critic Roland Barthes suggested that this kind of redundant detail—the scratch of a comb against a bowl, tubers among the graves, a bronze key—constitutes “a kind of narrative luxury.” They are elements which seem to be extraneous and have no function in the development of the plot, no independent meaning within the narrative. So, Barthes asks, “what is the significance of this insignificance?” Is it simply a question of verisimilitude, of creating a true-to-life concrete reality? Details, he argues, are “referential illusions”; that is, they evoke the “real” world which is deemed to be real precisely because it lies beyond meaning.
This may be part of it, but there’s also Chekhov’s gun theory; the idea that every detail in a story ought to serve some purpose. If a gun crops up in a story, it must be used. Like Pozdnyshev’s sockless, stockinged feet in Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. The murderous protagonist declares at the beginning that he’s caught in a loveless marriage like an animal in a trap. When he catches a cab from the station to his house through the icy streets, resolute in his decision to kill his wife who he believes is unfaithful, Pozdnyshev realizes that during the train ride he has taken off his woolen socks and put them in his traveling bag. As he enters the apartment and removes his boots, he creeps through the rooms in his sockless, stockinged feet. And finally, when he strikes his wife and her alleged lover runs from the scene, Pozdnyshev confesses: “I wanted to follow the other, but I felt that it would be ridiculous to pursue in my stockings the lover of my wife, and I did not wish to be grotesque, I wished to be terrible.”
Socks and stockings, here, are the story’s guns; details integral to the plot and to the themes which the story explores: the coexistence of the humdrum with the extraordinary, comedy with tragedy, the humane with the inhumane, timidity with vanity. But we don’t read these details as we would a paw mark in the wild. The sockless feet lead us through the story without us knowing it, and that unawareness is crucial because as Tarkovsky once observed—perhaps a key to his inclusion of the Bruegel painting in Solaris—“If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.” As a supplement to this cautionary advice is W. G. Sebald’s comment in the novel Vertigo: “Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything.”
When I spotted those prints in the snow, I didn’t imagine that they would open a door onto a world of tracking beyond the garden; that they would lead to other readings and to this page, here, these words on the screen.