Barnabo of the Mountains by Dino Buzzati

First published:Barnabo delle montagne, 1933 (English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Psychological parable

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: The mountains around the village of San Nicola in northern Italy and a farm in the valley

Principal Characters:

• Barnabo, a young forest-guard
• Berton, also a forest-guard, friendly with Barnabo
• Other Forest-Guards

The Novel

Barnabo of the Mountains follows the experience of one man, in his relationship with the forbidding but fascinating mountains, through a crisis of honor and cowardice in the course of carrying out his duties as a forest-guard, and his subsequent deeply felt need to prove and redeem himself. Dino Buzzati openly acknowledged the influence of other writers, among them Joseph Conrad, especially Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). This influence is particularly strong in Barnabo of the Mountains, in the theme of redemption and in the relationship of the characters with the elements and with their environment.

Buzzati’s novella opens with a fantasy map of the area and a precise description of the setting in which the forest-guards live. They are moving their headquarters into the “New House,” built because their previous base, the “Old Mardens’ House,” is falling into disrepair. One of their duties is to guard the “Polveriera,” or “Powder-Magazine,” a hut nestled in the rocks. It was built during a road-building project through the mountains as a place to store explosives. The project abandoned, the explosives remained, and more ammunition was added as the authorities recognized its safe location conveniently close to the border. In the course of the move to the New House, the head forest-guard, an old man full of stories about the inaccessibility and threat of the mountains and the people who died in them, is killed by mountain bandits. Thus, from the beginning, human temporality is emphasized in opposition to the timelessness of the mountains. Del Colle, the old forest-guard, is buried in the mountains, and his grave, with his plumed cap nailed to the rock, remains as a symbol of man’s affinity with this environment.

Buzzati places the reader in a world that combines myth and reality. The towering mountain peaks of the map owe more to Grimm’s fairy tales than to any map of northern Italy, although the setting described is recognizable as the mountains of the Alpine region around Belluno, where Buzzati was born. The “bandits” belong as much to the world of opera as to that of reality. The forest-guards (guardiaboschi, a semimilitary organization responsible for the maintenance of order in the mountains and forest regions) reflect a code of honor as reminiscent of the Old French chansons de geste as of twentieth century militarism.

A hunt for the bandits fails to unearth any trace of them, but the foresters’ interest does not abate. One day Berton, on guard duty, sees a column of smoke. He tells Barnabo and the two reconnoiter on their own. They do not find the bandits, but Barnabo rescues a wounded crow. On their return, Barnabo and Berton become separated. Back at the base, the bandits are discovered raiding the Polveriera. Barnabo, instinctively about to join his colleagues, is halted by another bandit armed with a rifle and stops. He is afraid. Berton, coming from another direction, joins in the fight and is wounded in one leg. The bandits escape safely, taking powder and ammunition. Barnabo, ashamed of his cowardice, wanders back into the woods, then returns, hours later, feigning ignorance at what has happened.

He is not shamed publicly for cowardice, but he is dismissed for abandoning his post. Berton covers for him by insisting that he was not there at all, but there is a certain ambiguity as to whether Berton knows or guesses what really happened and whether the Inspector knows. It may be only Barnabo’s guilty conscience which makes him wonder, and the feeling of guilt which oppresses him.

Followed by the crow he rescued, Barnabo leaves the mountains and settles on his cousin’s farm in the distant plains. Time passes. The crow becomes ill. Weakened, it flies off into the clouds toward the invisible mountains. Barnabo is ashamed at the sense of desolation he feels at its loss: the breaking of the final, tenuous link with the rocks, woods, and peaks he left behind in a past which he cannot recapture.

As the result of an unexpected visit from Berton, who has left the service of his own choice, Barnabo, five years after being dismissed, returns to San Nicola. Misunderstanding Berton’s casual invitation, Barnabo takes out his forest-guard’s uniform, now dusty, worn, and covered with moth holes, which he carefully mends before anyone has the chance to see them.

Things have changed in San Nicola. Following more raids by the bandits, the explosives and ammunition have been removed from the Polveriera to the nearest military post, thus relieving the forest-guards of this duty. The New House has been abandoned, the forest-guards billeted in the village and incorporated into the guardiani communali. Barnabo, by devious hints, elicits the offer of the position of a sort of caretaker of the empty New House. The other forest-guards emphasize the loneliness of the post, while promising frequent visits to him, and especially one visit on a specific date on which the brigands had defiantly promised to return.

In the New House, Barnabo finds things the same and yet different. He is painfully conscious of not being a forest-guard as before but one of their employees. He finds a certain tranquillity in the familiar woods but remains continually haunted by the idea of redeeming himself, of canceling out his past cowardice.

On the promised date, Barnabo makes extensive preparations for the expected forest-guards, who do not appear. He understands then that they have fooled him, that they never intended to visit him. Unlike Barnabo, they seem to be able to break away from the mountains casually and completely. On the following day, Barnabo goes to the Polveriera, and beyond it. Four bandits keep their appointment, and at first Barnabo is delighted at the victory within his grasp. He can shoot them and absolve himself of his earlier cowardice. When he observes them more closely, however, he sees that they are old men, thin, worn, and he does nothing—not out of fear or cowardice this time but because the need to kill them belongs to the past, like so many other events. To the present belongs a sense of joy and tranquillity, here in the mountains bathed in sunlight. Those men, he is certain, will never return: This is their last visit.

He returns to the deserted New House, empties his rifle, throws open the windows. Time, he knows, will flow evenly over him as over the mountains. While the night passes slowly, he stands in the doorway with his rifle, thinking he can hear, as in the past, the sentinel pacing near the Polveriera. Yet he knows the mountains are still and silent.

The Characters

Buzzati’s characters are invariably closer to being types or symbols than real people with individual characteristics or psychological depth. Unlike the other forest-guards, Barnabo is not given a last name in the novel; in the roll call of the forest-guards, he is the last: “they call him only by his name and he will later become Barnabo of the mountains.” This lack of a family name emphasizes his isolation, the gap existing between Barnabo and the other forest-guards, the villagers of San Nicola, and later, the nebulous figures of his cousin and the other farm workers. His overwhelming characteristic is his close affinity with nature, with the mountains, which can be interpreted as the symbol of spiritual ascent toward an ideal. The initial punishment for dishonor is expulsion and exile. Once this exile has run its course, Barnabo can overcome and expiate his fault only by returning to the mountains.

The other forest-guards are equally undefined, lacking psychological delineation. They are figures that surround the central character. Berton, his closest friend, plays the role of Oliver to Barnabo’s Roland: a companion and foil in the qualities he exhibits. Molo, a very minor character, serves to highlight Barnabo’s heroic sensitivity and generosity when the latter fails to win a fight so as not to humiliate Molo. Montani is the forest-guard who encounters a brigand in the dark, in the deserted Mardens’ House—an encounter narrated to Barnabo by Berton. Although the forest-guards have individual names, ultimately most of them are not much more clearly defined than the anonymous brigands who oppose them. Much more distinctive is the setting: the mountains in their beauty, in their variety of moods, whether friendly or menacing, and in their timelessness.

Critical Context

Barnabo of the Mountains was Buzzati’s first published novel. In 1933, the Italian literary scene was already heavily influenced by Fascism, which encouraged a combination of rural peasant values and classical, mythical heroism. Buzzati, however, exploring his own internal world, was unaffected by the political developments and in no way reflected his historical situation. Neither Barnabo of the Mountains nor the novella which followed, Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio (1935; the secret of the old wood), attracted much attention from the critics. In its surrealistic quality of moral fable, Barnabo of the Mountains was too far removed from the specific reality required of literature at that time. On the other hand, it remained totally inoffensive to the regime and therefore aroused no opposition.

Buzzati is not totally divorced from reality. The setting of the novel is realistic, as are the characters. The surreality, or absurd element, derives from the atmosphere of anxiety and mystery. The brigands, for example, while on one level real robbers or possibly smugglers, are invested with an almost supernatural aura.

Barnabo of the Mountains appears in English in a collection of Buzzati’s writings translated by Lawrence Venuti, The Siren (1984). This first novel clearly announces the elements of existential angst intermingled with fantasy parable which will continue through Buzzati’s later work, especially in Il deserto dei Tartari (1940; The Tartar Steppe, 1952), considered by many to be Buzzati’s major work.

Bibliography

Gianfranceschi, Fausto. Dino Buzzati, 1967.

Lagana Gion, Antonella. Dino Buzzati: Un autore da rileggere, 1983.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXXXIX (October 28, 1984),p. 32.

Panafieu, Yves. “Aspetti storici, morali e politici del discorso sull’impotenza,” in Dino Buzzati, 1982. Edited by Alvise Fontanella.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXVI (August, 1984), pp. 75-76.

Spera, Francesco."Modelli narrativi del primo Buzzati,” in Dino Buzzati, 1982. Edited by Alvise Fontanella.

Veronese-Arslan, Antonia. Invito alla lettura di Buzzati, 1974.