61 pages • 2-hour read
Across the River and into the Trees
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, illness, substance use, animal death, graphic violence, and rape.
The Impact of War on Identity
The colonel is a military man, and war is a fundamental part of his identity in both his own eyes and others’. The narrative acknowledges the relationship between identity and war even in using the colonel’s military title as a marker of identity more often than any variation of his given name, Richard Cantwell. The other characters similarly recognize the significance of the colonel’s military history, acknowledging his rank and title as a form of identity. For the colonel, this results in tension between war as an essential and inescapable part of his identity and a desire to break free from his past. The colonel attempts to defy the expectations associated with a man of his military experience. He wants to be refined and cultured, yet the colonel remains the colonel regardless of how many languages he speaks or menus he peruses. His cultural affections are reduced to affectations against the formative, definitional experience of war.
This dynamic is particularly apparent in his interactions with Renata. When he comes to Venice, he plans to spend a few of his remaining days with his young lover. In the colonel’s mind, this is a romantic venture, both because of his love for Renata and his love for the city. Yet Renata cannot disassociate the colonel from the war. To her, his identity is conditioned by his involvement in the war that killed her father and shaped the history of her city. This presents a difficult problem to the colonel, who must decide how much to tell his young lover. He fears that he is boring her, but he also fears that he will tell her too much and that she will judge him for being violent or brutal. He fears that he will forever limit his identity in the eyes of his lover. Moreover, since Renata embodies Venice, her interactions with the colonel evoke the broader impossibility of moving beyond his military identity in a city that has gone through the trauma of the war (a point that his anxieties about encountering former fascists similarly underscore).
The duck shoot that bookends the novel is an emotional substitute for the rigors of war. The mechanical actions are the same, but the colonel is shooting at ducks rather than men. Still, the colonel takes pride in each action. He is determined to shoot well, and his satisfaction is clear in his conversation with Alvarito: He “enjoyed what there was very much” (232), even if he shot very few ducks. As a leisure activity of the privileged that nevertheless draws on the colonel’s military skills, the hunt seemingly offers the colonel a way to reconcile who he is with who he would like to be. Ultimately, however, the shoot cannot be separated from the trauma of war. In the same conversation with Alvarito, the colonel learns that the surly boatman who threatened to intrude on his pleasure harbors a grudge because Allied soldiers raped his wife and daughter. In this moment, the colonel is forced to acknowledge not only the extent and permanence of war as a marker of identity but also the fact that members of his own side acted immorally. War remains an inescapable part of identity for both those who fought and those who suffered.
Masculinity and Authority Under the Pressure of Physical Decline
Across the River and into the Trees closely identifies masculinity with authority. The protagonist embodies both as a masculine figure who conveys his authority with an ease and a directness that please him greatly. When he dines with Renata, for example, he is pleased to assert his authority through his knowledge of culture and wine. He invites her opinion, then makes suggestions, and often eventually orders on her behalf, directing her to certain menu items with a quiet authority that she encourages. Similarly, he organizes the cadence of their time together, whether they are ordering her “a breakfast to end breakfasts” or taking her on a gondola ride (157). To the colonel, the exercise of authority is thus married to what he perceives as his role in the relationship—to take charge and to court. In referring to Renata as “Daughter,” he conflates this role with another traditionally masculine one; he frames himself as a father figure, consciously filling the void in her life left behind by her deceased father. However, Renata deviates from the traditional feminine role in key ways—she is wealthier than the colonel and unafraid to challenge his assertions—suggesting the fragility of the mode of masculinity the colonel embodies.
In particular, the novel implies that the colonel’s desire to assert masculinity and authority is a direct consequence of the colonel’s physical decline. His heart condition adds practical impetus to the romantic encounter, as he recognizes that this may be the last time that he can enjoy the company of a lover. More broadly, the colonel feels the pressure of his waning health as an imposition on his authority, a terrifying reminder that he is not in control of his life or even his own body. This is an ironic situation for the colonel. His desire to show his affection for Renata exists in tension with his faltering health: His heart is giving out just as he wants to demonstrate to Renata (and to himself) that he has the capacity in his heart to love. The notion that he cannot romance his beautiful young partner is, to the colonel, a direct challenge to his masculinity. This creates in him an even more intense desire to assert authority in whatever way he can, even steering the boat during the duck shoot, though he knows that doing so is not good for his physical health—a further hint that the assertive form of masculinity the colonel embodies is ultimately self-defeating.
The novel’s depiction of the colonel engages with a recurring trope of Hemingway’s fiction. The so-called Hemingway protagonist, also known as a Code Hero, is a character who is stoic and resilient in the face of the harshness and the chaos of reality. Such Code Heroes handle challenges with courage and fortitude, demonstrating their mastery of their own internal moral code. They embody ideas of endurance, suffering, and struggle in a way that is directly correlated with their understanding of masculinity, yet they are also frequently vulnerable in this latter respect (Jake, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, is strongly implied to have been castrated by a war injury). The colonel is an example of such a character. In the past, he fought in two world wars, often struggling to adhere to his personal moral code amid orders from his superior officers. Masculinity, in this respect, is a fundamental but also embattled part of the colonel’s character, and his advancing age and illness have only heightened those tensions.
Coming to Terms with Mortality and Illness
The narrative of Across the River and into the Trees centers on the colonel’s reckoning with mortality and illness. Chronologically, the journey to Venice begins with the colonel’s checkup. He leaves the doctor’s office with a very clear understanding of his own mortality, framing his journey as a metaphysical exploration of his emotional state as he tries to manage the last days of his life.
In particular, the colonel wants to experience these final days on his own terms: He wishes to romance his young lover, spend time in his favorite city, and go hunting for ducks with his friends. This desire to participate in favored activities is an implicit acknowledgement of mortality, as the colonel seeks to experience a final flash of joy as his heart threatens to stop. The journey can also be understood as the colonel defiantly asserting his sense of self in the face of his growing sense of mortality. He wants to demonstrate his virility to himself (and the rest of the world) by courting the young, beautiful Renata. He wants to show himself to be a man of culture, a man who is respected in his beloved Venice, and someone who can shoot with the best. In choosing how he spends his last days, the colonel is acknowledging his inevitable death but also seeking to determine how he is remembered.
An important illustration of the way in which the colonel manages his illness is his relationship with medicine. Claiming that he can “spit good now for a man who doesn’t chew” (18), the colonel refuses to take his heart pills with water. He swallows them raw and reluctantly, the dryness of his throat a testament to his attempt to preserve some semblance of masculine identity even as he feels emasculated by his need for medicine. When he does drink with his pills, the colonel prefers wine or cocktails. Throughout the novel, he self-medicates with a variety of carefully chosen alcoholic drinks. Both the alcohol-induced numbness and the cultural cache of drinking high-end wine and cocktails are means of coping with physical and emotional discomfort.
The colonel’s concerns are portrayed against the backdrop of a city and a country experiencing their own form of decline. Italy, the colonel acknowledges, was on the losing side of the war. Venice may have been saved from the bombing campaigns, thus preserving many of its physical structures, but there is a sense of moral decay that is felt throughout the novel. The colonel is followed through the streets by two young men who—he believes—target him because he is an American. He suspects that they are former fascists, just like the hotel employee whom he catches searching through his luggage. These fascists survived the war; their continued presence in the city (particularly compared to the colonel’s deceased friends and allies) is an affront to the colonel’s sensibilities. They have escaped unpunished and bring their resentment into the present. They will also outlive the colonel, leaving him with the horrible sense that the city he loves is falling victim to a rot that he cannot stop. This casts a long shadow across the colonel’s beloved city, contributing to the symbolic “breaking” of his heart.
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