The Tartar Steppe

Looking at the Wikipedia page of the twentieth-century Italian novelist Dino Buzzati, the other day, I encountered the following dry account of his life and career: "As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death."

Because any of the random atomic facts of the universe can be made to serve as grist for the mill of one's own existential anxieties, if you squint at them enough, this sentence quickly acquired personal meaning for me: "Aha!" I said to the universe: "See? It's not so odd to just take a job at a place and stay there until one retires! Loads of people do it! I'm sure he was perfectly happy!"

Meaning: I should not in fact go to law school. Meaning: I should stay at my present place of employment for the next thirty or however many years, until my career is done. If Dino Buzzati could do it, why not I? I'm sure he was content with his lot and accepted his life, instead of constantly and needlessly trying to change it. 

I subsequently opened the novel by Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe, that had been the reason for my inquiring into his life in the first place. And I discovered, to my dismay, that the novel is precisely an expression of the deep soul-anguish and existential terror of a man who has remained for far too long in the same job, who regrets it, and who wishes he had gotten out long before. 

Such, at any rate, is the interpretation I placed upon it, in my present state of angst. To be sure, the novel is exquisitely mysterious, and any number of meanings can be read into it. Indeed, I think the most common interpretation of the novel is a political one, and I had gone to it initially with that purpose in mind, not for any career advice. 

The novel was written on the eve of the Second World War, after all, and describes life at a lone frontier outpost where the soldiers are forever preparing for and eagerly anticipating a conflict that never seems to come. As the great powers dance around one another for another week in Eastern Europe, in our present era, I thought such a tale might have something to say about our contemporary plight. 

But, perhaps inevitably, I found in practice a much more personal meaning in the story. When the protagonist, Lieutenant Drogo, arrives at the hill fort for the first time, it felt like me watching the admitted students videos for law schools, and being reminded that these are in fact places full of hyper-competitive people in their early- to mid-20s:

"The Fort seemed to him one of those unknown worlds to which he had never seriously thought he might belong—not that they seemed unpleasant, but rather because they appeared infinitely remote from his own life." (Hood translation throughout). Like Drogo, I was seized in the next moment by a desire to turn tail and flee home, "to his own city, to his old habits."

But as he settles into the new routines of the hill fort, and discovers that it is not so easy a matter to escape and return home after all, this image dissolved. The outpost came to stand in for me instead for the life I have been living for the past five years, working for the same organization, wondering if I should ever leave, and asking myself whether to stay or to go was the greater opportunity cost. 

Drogo's dread as he remains in the fort, seeing himself gradually be transformed into an "old hand," is sharpened by seeing other young men in his situation depart the fort after a time to pursue more glittering careers in the city.  But he stays on, because he is bewitched by the promise the old fort seems to hold out of some greater and more mysterious glory, if only one can stand the long wait. 

After five years in the same place, I—like Drogo—have been there long enough to watch other similarly-situated young people on the cusp of their careers depart for other opportunities: law school, new jobs. And the lieutenant's bitterness is not unfamiliar to me: "They leave him behind. He watches them disappear into the distance [...] prey to his usual doubts: perhaps he really has made a mistake?"

But I, like Drogo, would then find ways to justify my choices. The familiar has its charms, after all: "the old habits caught him up again with the old rhythm, and Drogo no longer thought of the others, of the comrades who had escaped in time, of his old friends grown rich and famous; he consoled himself with the sight of the officers who shared his exile[.]"

Yet even the comfort of routine, with all its power, will not suffice on its own to keep a person tied to a single place, a single task. There must also be, for Drogo and the other officers, the glimmer of hope, however faint, that something transcendent, something real, something great, will finally happen to them if they just stick it out in their post. 

And for them, this hope is concentrated on the distant horizon of the desert they survey, where they imagine each day a mysterious enemy might finally appear, bringing glory and a soldier's noble death in their train. 

The tragic irony of the novel's ending (read no further if you don't want it spoiled) is that Drogo and the other old hands are carted off into retirement just before the great battle finally arrives. They were the ones who waited at their post for exactly this day. Yet, when it comes, they are deprived of the glory, while the officers who chose the comfortable life in the city are permitted to ride in as reinforcements, on the day of battle, and reap the reward of other mens' patience. 

Yet, as much as Drogo feels cheated by this fate, he comes in the novel's final pages to realize that the glory he always sought was—in any event—an illusion. The enemy army that finally approaches does not, after all, promise anything transcendent. It is composed merely of other mortals, not so different from Drogo himself— "like him tortured by desires and suffering." 

The true battle, he discovers, is not with other humans; it is the final battle that every person must face, whether on the battlefield or at home, whether in the fort or in the city, no matter the life they have led or the career they have chosen: the fact of death, of finitude, of mortality. 

This is the sense in which The Tartar Steppe is not really a warning against Drogo's particular life choices, but a commentary on the universal human condition. As much as one might be tempted to read into it the author's own sublimated angst about his decision to work at the same newspaper for however many decades, then, or as much as I might scan it for advice or commentary on my own career choices, it is about more than that. 

After all, we see Drogo's disappointments only because he is the character we follow. Had Buzzati written the story of one of his comrades, who escapes the hill fort and lives a grand life in the city, could he not have written just as tragic a tale of frustrated hopes? No matter the career we pursue, we are all in some sense occupying the same fort, scanning the horizon, waiting for something we can't put into words. 

Many writers have observed that human life is a matter of "waiting for something that never arrives," whether it be Godot, the Tartars, the army of the "northern kingdom" in Buzzati's novel or the "barbarians" in Coetzee's later novel that took its inspiration partly from The Tartar Steppe. So common is the observation in fact, that I have found it in near-identical words in such diverse sources as Yeats' letters, Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, and John Williams' Butcher's Crossing. 

Why does whatever we are waiting for never actually arrive? Because it can't. Because what human beings desire is the infinite, and that, by definition, can never finally be attained. As Carlyle put it in Sartor Resartus: the human being "has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God's infinite Universe[.]"

The mystery, though, the beauty as well as the tragedy of human fate, stems from the fact that meaning in life can only be attained through pointing ourselves in the direction of the infinite, and moving toward it, even if we can never meet out goal. We may be, like Moses, forever fated to perish just before reaching the promised land. We may be, like Drogo, forever retiring just as the real life, the true life, the glory we were promised, is finally about to start. 

But it is toward reality, toward infinity, that we must strive nonetheless.