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Tim Parks


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The Tartar Steppeby Dino Buzzati,translated by Stuart C. Hood.David R. Godine, 1995,$13.95 paper.

Now a book lives, wrote D.H. Lawrence, as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is

fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. Heuses the remark to launch an attack on allegory, indeed on all stories that offer aneat equivalence between their characters or settings and abstract qualities. A

man is more than a Christian, he protests, a rider on a white horse must be morethan mere faithfulness and truth.

Written in 1938,The Tartar Steppeis the story of a young officer dispatched to doservice in a remote mountain garrison overlooking a vast northern desert. At first

desperate to escape and return to the pleasures of normal life, he nevertheless fallsunder the spell of the place to the point that he will spend the next thirty yearsthere, sustained only by the vain hope that one day an enemy attack will offer amoment of glory and fulfillment. Buzzati remarked: the idea of the novel cameout of the monotonous night-shift I was working atCorriere della Serain thosedays. It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eatup my whole life quite pointlessly. Its a common enough feeling, I think, for most

people, especially when you find yourself slotted into the time-tabled existence ofa big town. Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was analmost instinctive decision.

Is the book, then, a mere allegory of equivalences? Buzzati had originally calledhis story The Fort and the title was only changed on the insistence of the

publishers, who were eager to avoid allusions to the sensitive military situation inEurope. One Italian critic remarks: The desert of the novel is thus the story oflife in the fort of the newspaper which promises the wonders of a solitude that is

both habit and vocation. You can already hear Lawrence muttering, fathomed

and dead!

But if its a commonplace that something explained is very largely explainedaway, it is also true that faced with any phenomenon the mind instinctively sets

out to construct an explanation. Here is an irony Lawrence doesnt follow up.Confronted with a story, any story, we immediately seek to fathom it out, to knowit, even though we realize that if we succeed it will no longer be interesting, it willdie. Oddly, then, the greatest pleasure we can get from a story only comes whenthe smaller satisfaction of having explained it away is thwarted. The minddiscards, as it were, the chaff of the explicable to find real repose, or realexcitement, in a kernel of enigma.

The Tartar Steppeis one of those precious novels that take the enormous risk ofthrowing down a gauntlet to the reasoning mind. Explain me if you can or dare, itsays. Fathom me out. Provocative and frightening as the book is, we feel we must

accept this challenge, put this disturbing story behind us. Who is this man whotosses away his life for a chimera, why does he seem so recognizable? Fortunately,


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the extraordinary clarity of the narrative, its elegant structure and straightforwardexecution, persuade us that it is that manner of thing for which explanation issurely available, a puzzle we can solve. Yet in the end, twisting and turning thisway and that, mocking and infinitely ironic, Buzzatis story somehow denies us

what we always felt was within our grasp. No, on putting the book down we

cannot honestly say that we know what it meant. Quite the contrary. In this way itsucceeds in evoking in its reader the central experience of its main character: inevery sense life, not only his own but the whole of life, eludes his grasp.

One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for

Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting.

And his lastThere is a ruthless dispatch to these opening lines which is typical

of the way Buzzati works. Already he knows exactly what he is doing. In a way

the whole novel will be written on the first page. Given no details of his past life,no sense of geographical or cultural location, Drogo is immediately and inevitablyEveryman. He has waited for this day, this departure, the beginning of his real

life, for years, but looking in the mirror now he doesnt find there theexpected joy. His early youth is gone, tediously consumed in books and study,

but fortunately adulthood promises new satisfactions, new hopes. For the next twohundred pages, Buzzati will show us how resourcefully and how cruelly suchhopes will ever sprout from the interminable erosion of Drogos wasted days, their

punctual disappointments. The wonder is that a writer should display suchmerciless control in elaborating a scenario of frustration and impotence.

Far from resembling the editing room of a big city newspaper, Fort Bastiani islocated on the highest and most inaccessible of mountain terrains. This isBuzzatis masterstroke, the decision that more than any other will give the book its

rich elusiveness. How can we not think of a medieval knight embarking on aspiritual quest as we watch Drogo urge his horse up winding paths beneath rockface and waterfall, lie down for the night wrapped in his cloak, emerge thefollowing morning at an altitude immeasurably higher than anything he expected,onto a narrow plateau where the yellow walls of the fort rise in the cleft betweentowering peaks? The scene is set for some apocalyptic trial. We are anxious thatour hero perform well.

But no trial presents itself, or at least none of the variety we expect. Drogo is notgoing to war. Nor is there a grail to recover. He will never meet the enemy, letalone be given a chance to slay an ogre or a giant. Only in routine regimentalrituals will his saber be bared, only at the endless changing of a meaningless guardwill the stirring trumpet sound. This is a story of drama deferred, catharsis denied.To compensate, there are the mountains.

Its important here to say a word on what the mountains meant for Buzzati, and

indeed on the place they occupy in the collective imagination of Italy in general,northern Italy in particular. Brought up in Belluno at the confluence of the Ardo

and Piave rivers immediately below the majestic Dolomites, Buzzati was ten yearsold when Italy joined the First World War and became involved in the one


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military campaign of modern times that Italians will still refer to as glorious.Defending a line that ran across the very peaks of the Alps from the Swiss borderto the Adriatic, the Italian troops hacked trenches in stone and snow, lived in cavesand igloos at frightening altitudes, attacked machine guns in terrain where the onlygrave was a heap of shards. Finally routed at Caporetto in the east with the loss of

half a million men, they nevertheless fought a desperate rearguard action to hold aline behind the Piave, a river north of Venice, whence the tide was eventuallyturned and the enemy chased north again. For an Italian, the northern mountainsare the locus par excellence of military glory.

And so much more than that, of course. In his early teens Buzzati began to climbin the Dolomites. It would be a life-long passion. A competent artist, he drew and

painted the mountains. He never tired of it. His first literary effort, at fourteen, wascalledLa canzone delle montagne(The Song of the Mountains). In his firstnovel,Barnabus of the Mountains, the Dolomites were already assuming a role atleast as important as that of the people in the book. So while the initial inspiration

for The Tartar Steppemay indeed have come out of the fear that a mindless officeroutine was eating up his life, Buzzati nevertheless chose to set that routine in alandscape that was his chief recreation, and also something he was clearly in thrallto, a limit-experience for him, a drug almost, an endless source of exhilaration.The effect is double-edged. Against the vast backdrop of pink peaks and darkgorges, dazzling ice-fields and dizzying gulfs, the rigid routine of the garrison inthe puny human geometry of the fort becomes more meaningless than ever. But italso takes on a borrowed sublimity. The mountains are that place where the sheerextravagance of natures waste and emptiness becomes sublime. And there is

something sublime about the way a group of soldiers can waste their whole livesobserving the severest of rules as they wait for an enemy who never materializes.

Inexplicably in the night, snow slips from a roof, a landslide alters the shape of acrag, freezing water splits a rock. There is an obscure complicity between thisalpine erosion and the web of wrinkles spreading across the stony faces of theguards as they gaze out across the desolate steppe to the north. The mountains, wediscover, offer a marvelous view of the void.

To read The Tartar Steppeis to be asked to take the idea of enchantment seriously.Young Drogo knows that he must not stay in the fort. It is isolated, futile. Nosooner has he arrived than he is asking to leave. He understands perfectly thatthere is no hope of ordinary human fulfillment here, or military glory for that

matter. Reassured by the smiles and blandishments of older officialshe doesntwant to let the side downhe agrees to stay a few months, at least until the firstmedical when he will be pronounced, they promise him, unsuitable for service athigh altitude. Immediately we are terribly anxious for him. He slips into theroutine. We feel it happening. The narrator will even insist that it is this cosy,easy, empty existence that will persuade Drogo not to leave when the medicalcomes along and the doctor gives him his chance. A moral failing, we are told. Butwe know it isnt so. Or it isnt just that. Drogo is enchanted. It is a spell that has

something to do with the meeting of human vanities and mountain landscape, afatal complicity between aspiration and emptiness. As the doctor speaks, our herocannot even bring himself to listen, intent as he is on the view from the window:

And it was then that he seemed to see the yellow walls of the fortress courtyardsoar up toward the crystal sky, while, above them and beyond, higher and ever


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higher, snow-topped bulwarks rose obliquely to solitary towers, tiny redoubts andairy fortifications he had never noticed before.

Drogo cannot tear himself away. He is doomed, seduced by this hubristic andfantastical vision of some vast engagement between man and mountain. At bottom

it is an aesthetic enchantment, the terrible sorcery of the magnificent gesture.Once, when there were real enemies, bloody battles to be fought, such magnificent

posturing could serve a social purpose. The glorious endeavorswordsbrandished over the dramatic landscape, fortifications built with tremendoussacrificewas still connected with the more mundane life down in the city. Themilitary hero protected that life. Now the gesture is entirely cut off from any otherreality, it lives only in the mind, entirely absurd, and paradoxically all the granderand more seductive for being so.

Cruelty, at least in literature, is a sign of election, wrote the Romanianphilosopher Emil Cioran. The more talented a writer is the more ingeniously hecontrives to put his characters in situations from which there is no escape; he

persecutes them, tyrannizes them, traps them in blind alleys, forces them toexperience every phase of a long drawn out agony.

Giovanni Drogo is never tortured, never hounded, never experiences extremes ofphysical pain, never loses love or suffers the shock of bereavement. Yet Ciorans

observation perfectly describes Buzzatis method. A pitiless psychology informs

Drogos dealings with his fellow soldiers, with the mountains, the desert, and withtime itself. Again and again in the various dramas with which the author so ably

fills out his story, keeps his readers hoping against hope for some improbablesalvation, Drogo is outflanked, outwitted, and fantastically ingenuous, above allabout himself. Yet everything that happens, every trick played by comrades,nature, and fate, is entirely believable, even normal. Never do we feel that Drogohas been singled out for special punishment. At one level we even suspect that heis not entirely unhappy with his unhappy destiny. This is the books perplexing

core.

Much, far too much, has been made of Buzzatis debt to Kafka. True, he flirts with

symbolism and surrealism; true, his writing is suffused with a sense of lifes

absurdity (a most stupid landscape, the major assures Drogo on his arrival at thefort); but the same is true of so many of his contemporariesCalvino, Beckett,and Thomas Mann, to name but three, all writers whose stories achieveverisimilitude precisely in their refusal to grant the drama we crave. What Buzzatidoes not share is the all-pervading paranoia that characterizes Kafkas writing; as aresult, the horror and humor that Buzzati evokes will, I suspect, prove morerecognizable to the general reader than Kafkas, closer to the grain of common

experience.

If asked to name the writer with whom Buzzati has perhaps the greatest affinity,one is tempted to say Giacomo Leopardi, Italys great poet of a hundred years

before. Leopardi, an early atheist, was obsessed by the role of hope in human life,a hope he remorselessly exposed as the product of illusion, yet saw, and


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occasionally celebrated, as ever ready to flower again even in the most barrenplaces, the most unexpected forms. This incorrigible inclination to hope, Leopardifelt, was both the curse and salvation of the race: it guaranteed that the definingexperience of human life would be disappointment, and allowed us to press onregardless.

Buzzatis intuition is that with the collapse of the great collective illusionsreligion, national destinyand the consequently intensifying sense of absurdity(there is no common enemy to sustain the forts purpose), the individual mind can

only react with ever more frenetic attempts to generate hope, the mostpreposterous hopes, out of nothing, to enchant itself with whatever desert terrain isavailable. Certainly the final chapters ofThe Tartar Steppepresent Drogo assomehow in complicity with novelist and reader to drag out a vain illusion,

perhaps even a whole tradition of literary fiction, far beyond the limits of reason.There is one marvelous moment, in particular, when the authorities ban the use oftelescopes. With the help of a powerful lens, Drogo and a friend had managed to

identify some tiny specks on the very edge of the visible horizon and had builtaround this mirage the fantasy of an approaching army that would at last bring tothe fort the catharsis of war. Denied the collective pursuit of this fantasy by orderof their superiors, Drogo nevertheless goes on staring into the empty desert until itseems his busy imagination, or Buzzatis, or perhaps ours, at last wills the enemy

into existence.

For at the very end of The Tartar Steppe, the prospect of real war finally doespresent itself. What a huge relief! How pleased, busy, even joyous everybody is!How eagerly the rusty military machine is set back in motion, how bright the facesof the young men as they march up the gloomy valleys to the fort! And the reader

is implicated too. Because you too are relieved, happy that war has come, that thewait is over. Yes, the reader too has been enchanted by the mirage of release, thefantasy that it might all have meant something.

Buzzatis typescript ofThe Tartar Steppewas submitted to the publishers inJanuary 1939. There is no need to comment on what followed. In any event, the

book still serves as an alarming reminder that the century that discoverednothingness would go to any lengths, however catastrophic, to fill that nothingnessup.

Tim Parks is the author ofDestiny, Europa, Adultery and Other Diversions, AnItalian Education, and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Verona,

Italy.


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