Biting the Wind

A writing and reading exercise.

A jack-hare came out, white, onto the snow, he twitched his ears, ran beneath the moon, but he was white and couldn’t be seen, as if he weren’t there. Only his little paws left a light print on the snow, like little clover leaves. Nor could the wolf be seen, for he was black and stayed in the black darkness of the forest. Only if he opened his mouth, his teeth were visible, white and sharp. 

There was a line where the forest, all black, ended and the snow began, all white. The hare ran on this side, and the wolf on that. 

The wolf saw the hare’s prints on the snow and followed them, always keeping in the black, so as not to be seen. At the point where the prints ended there should be the hare, and the wolf came out of the black, opened wide his red maw and his sharp teeth, and bit the wind. 

The hare was a bit farther on, invisible; he scratched one ear with his paw, and escaped, hopping away.

Is he here? There? Is he a bit farther on?

Only the expanse of snow could be seen, white as this page. 

Italo Calvino, “Santa’s Children”

This final scene in the final story of Italo Calvino’s story collection, Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City, speaks to many of the things I worked to teach students in both creative writing and literature classes, and I used it as the basis for an in-class writing/discussion exercise in probably every class I ever taught at both the college and high school level from graduate school on.  

While I used it in a range of ways, I eventually settled on one exercise. I asked students to take out a piece of paper and a writing implement, and I told them that I was going to read them a very short story, and I wanted them to draw it for me. You might take a minute now and read back through the passage above and imagine yourself trying to draw it (or go ahead and grab a sheet of paper and give it a go). 

You’ll find that you have to make some decisions. Do you draw an actual jack-hare and an actual wolf? The challenge is that the story describes the jack-hare with its “twitching ears,” the wolf with its “sharp teeth,” even as it tells us each of them is invisible, “as if he weren’t there.” Students would then hold up their drawings and explain their decisions. Some drew intricate, detailed hares, a large, looming wolf emerging from a dark forest—those words “wolf,” “jack-hare,” conjured up a wealth of images. Others simply colored in one whole side of the page in graphite or ink and left the other side of the page blank with just a crescent moon over everything, the jack-hare maybe just an outline of hashmarks, the wolf a disembodied mouth emerging from the blackness….

If I were teaching a fiction writing class, I would then ask the students to do some writing, considering what the exercise might be saying about the task of creating meaningful, dynamic stories. I might then ask them to come up with their own allegories about the writing process as a homework assignment. For literature classes, I would ask students to write about what the exercise might help us consider when attempting to discover meaning in a literary text. While there were certainly times when the exercise didn’t work well, the students not engaged, maybe just not in the mood for drawing and thinking in this way, most of the time it led to a range of compelling and often new ways of thinking about the task of making literary meaning and/or discovering and writing/saying something compelling about literary meaning. 

For literature students, many saw themselves as the wolf, following the “tiny prints,” the black and white words of the text on the page, working to “catch” the meaning as the wolf attempts to devour the jack-hare. And the details of Calvino’s words leads to other insights. Literary meaning can’t be captured in this way; it is always one step beyond us, in that it is non rational and conveyed in a fundamentally different way than argument-based meaning. The act of trying to capture it, however, leads the wolf (reader) to ask some fundamental questions. “Is he here? There? Is he a bit farther on?” Furthermore, the wolf/reader through the close observation of the prints (text) finds himself exposed, having moved out of the comfort of the black forest where he was once so safe and hidden in his own black fur. Surely good literature does this to us as well, forces us to cast aside the security of our ordinary lives and leap toward something we won’t fully capture or grasp—but will bring us to asking meaningful, probing questions. 

The literature student can also think of the wolf as the protagonist of the narrative itself. He is Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, pursuing something he sees in Gatsby that speaks to something in himself, and that remarkable last page of the novel, Nick staring out at the Long Island Sound, imagining the first western explorers to arrive, the vast forests that “pandered to their dreams,” seems a lot like Calvino’s exposed and intellectually curious wolf working hard to make deep and lasting discoveries.  He is Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter exposed right from the novel’s outset of the novel to the shortcomings and contradictions of Puritan law, living outside of the walls of old Boston, always asking important, penetrating questions about morality, custom, human versus natural “laws.” The wolf’s actions also speak to Hamlet’s “madness” as he leaps forth and works to unravel powerful, existential dilemmas even as those around him pretend all is well and normal in Denmark—that nothing is “rotten.” 

For fiction writers, Calvino’s short narrative also offers insight and inspiration—from the fundamental requirements of a good story to the limitations and magic of creation. You need drama, tension, menace, characters in conflict, on some kind of quest. The wolf’s quest to capture and devour the jack-hare can be used as a kind of template for fiction writers. What motivates your characters? What are they after? What stands in their way? Furthermore, Calvino’s narrative provides a way to think about how to resolve or let those aspirations culminate. The wolf doesn’t get what he wanted, but he gets something both more and less than what he had bargained for. For one thing, he realizes his own error (his hubris) and the limitations of his perceptions. Just following the footsteps is not enough; the jack-hare will always be resting on his last set of prints, so they will be hidden, and therefore he could be in any of a range of possible directions beyond the last set of prints. The wolf only bites the wind, after all… His reasoning has failed him; the jack-hare is not resting on the last sent of prints, so his “there should be the hare” speaks to his own logical shortcomings/flaws. And the wolf’s series of questions could also speak to a kind of epiphany, a deepening of understanding—but notice how relatively small it is and how open-ended it is as well. Yes, our characters should make discoveries, deepen their understanding of themselves and the worlds they inhabit (they should move out of the darkness of their protecting landscapes—their dark forests), but they need not “figure it all out.” Many students (myself included) found it very helpful to return to this short narrative that ends Calvino’s collection rather than thinking of traditional, creative writing structures like “rising action,” “climax,” “denouement.” Calvino’s narrative provides a more nuanced and useful overlay. 

For both creative writing and literature students, the narrative offers many other things to discuss and think about, most notably for me is that very last line. “Only the expanse of snow could be seen as white as this page.” Here Calvino more overtly acknowledges that his story is also an allegory about writing, and at the very end of his collection he chooses to reach out from the white pages filled with black marks and awaken the reader from their “suspension of disbelief.” We are suddenly reminded, just as the story ends, that we hold a book in our hands. I can’t help but think that Calvino insisted on a last page that was mostly white space, as you can see in the image above, that he wanted this final, mini-story to awaken us from our dream immersion into his powerful, magical, playful narratives. Here he emphasizes that a writer’s tools are the humblest, just black marks on a white page, only black and white, like so many of the drawings students did—one way of conceiving of the imagery of the story—the wolf all black, the jack-hare all white, both “unseen” but still, somehow three dimensional and real, the “red” of the wolf’s maw even somehow emerging from the pages into our mind’s eye.

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