War as Waiting and as Simulacrum: from Homer to Buzzati and Calvino

War constitutes one of the densest symbolic spaces in the Western literary tradition, not so much as a historical fact but as a form through which human beings have thought about their relationship with time, with action and with finitude. If, in the epic horizon, it appears as an original and foundational experience, capable of giving meaning to existence and making it narratable, in twentieth-century modernity war undergoes a progressive loss of ontological consistency. It does not disappear, but transforms: from a decisive event it becomes waiting, from an embodied experience it is reduced to an abstract form, until it reveals itself as a simulacrum. The comparison between the Odyssey, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati and The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino allows us to follow this metamorphosis as a unified movement, in which not only the representation of war changes, but also the very possibility of an authentic existence, according to a line of interpretation that finds in the thought of Martin Heidegger an essential theoretical reference. In the Homeric world, war is not simply an episode of the past, but the silent origin that makes narration possible and grounds the identity of the hero. The Odyssey begins when the Trojan War has already ended, and yet every gesture of Odysseus bears its imprint: the return is narratable only because it is preceded by a war experience that has exposed the hero to risk and death. War gives unity to memory and orients time toward fulfillment, transforming existence into a sequence endowed with meaning.

In this perspective, warlike action does not suspend life, but intensifies it; the hero is defined through decision and exposure to finitude. Read retrospectively in light of Heidegger, this epic figure seems to embody an original mode of being-toward-death, in which awareness of the end does not paralyze action, but constitutes its condition of possibility. War, as an event, founds identity, time and narration together.

It is precisely this original unity that is radically fractured in Buzzati’s novel. In The Tartar Steppe, war remains as a horizon of meaning, but loses all concreteness: it does not happen, rather it is endlessly awaited. The Bastiani Fortress appears as a space separated from the world, governed by a suspended temporality in which the future absorbs and empties the present. Giovanni Drogo does not live war as an experience, but as a promise that should one day justify his existence. Unlike the Homeric hero, who is constituted in the event, Drogo builds his identity on the absence of the event itself. In Heideggerian terms, this waiting does not coincide with an authentic openness to possibility, but with a form of inauthenticity: life is entrusted to an indeterminate future, withdrawing from decision in the present. War thus no longer founds meaning, but postpones it indefinitely, transforming into a device that legitimizes the procrastination of existence. Heroism survives as an image, as an anticipated narrative, but never materializes as lived experience.

With Calvino a further shift is completed. In The Nonexistent Knight, war is finally present, regulated and perfectly functioning, but the subject who should embody it lacks ontological consistency. Agilulfo does not await the event, he passes through it; however, his existence coincides entirely with form, with norm and with the language of duty. If Drogo was defined by waiting, Agilulfo is defined by function. The irony of the narrative does not soften, but rather radicalizes the reflection: war survives as ritual, as a set of procedures that reproduce heroism without containing its truth. In a Heideggerian perspective, Agilulfo represents the extreme outcome of a subjectivity that has lost any original relationship with being: he is not simply inauthentic, but deprived of that existential consistency that would make authenticity itself possible. War, reduced to pure form, becomes a simulacrum of an experience that can no longer be lived. Considered along a continuous line, Buzzati and Calvino do not offer two simple variations on the theme of war, but articulate two complementary moments of its modern transformation. In Buzzati, war loses reality through infinite postponement; in Calvino through absolute formalization. In both cases, however, it continues to function as a decisive symbolic reference, precisely insofar as its original experience is denied. The epic hero, who acted by taking finitude upon himself, gives way first to the man who delegates meaning to a future event and then to the figure who coincides entirely with the role, without any interiority. What changes along this trajectory is the relationship between subject and time: from the destiny-laden time of epic one moves to the suspended time of waiting and finally to a purely procedural time, devoid of authentic openness.

In this perspective, war does not appear as a simple narrative theme, but as a lens through which literature interrogates the crisis of experience in modernity. If in the Odyssey the war event unified action, memory and narration, in the twentieth century it instead reveals the fracture between form and life, between action and meaning. Buzzati shows the risk of an existence entirely entrusted to the promise of a decisive event that never arrives; Calvino stages the opposite yet specular outcome, in which the event is present but emptied of any lived dimension. War thus becomes the place where the difficulty of modern man to authentically inhabit his own time manifests itself in a particularly radical way. More than marking a simple evolutionary line, the implicit dialogue between Homer, Buzzati and Calvino highlights three different ways through which literature has attempted to measure the distance between human beings and the experience of reality.

War, from an original space of action, progressively becomes a mirror of modern consciousness: first a promise that holds existence on an interminable threshold, then a formal device that survives even when the subject dissolves. What emerges is not only the crisis of heroism, but a deeper transformation in the way human beings inhabit time and attribute meaning to their actions. In this tension between epic memory and twentieth-century irony, literature does not offer a solution, but keeps a question open: if the decisive event no longer grounds identity, where can human experience still find consistency? It is perhaps precisely in the gap between waiting and simulacrum that the critical function of modern narrative is revealed, capable not of restoring a lost origin, but of relentlessly interrogating the void it leaves behind.