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Home , Josey Wales (character), Rebellion (2001), Sondra Locke, Ten Bears, The Outlaw Josey Wales

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ”: The Ethics of in The Outlaw Erika Behrisch Elce Royal Military College of Canada

lint eastwood’s role as the sympathetic outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Cpresents students in my first-year literature classes at the Royal Military College of Canada with an ethical conundrum. The film and its epony- mous hero underscore the slippery nature of morality in a time of war as well as the ethics of rebellion. The film dramatizes a scenario that may well become reality for some rmcc cadets, all of whom have dedicated at least a portion of their professional lives to upholding national values in a military context and have committed themselves to being potentially “lawfully ordered into harm’s way under conditions that could lead to the loss of their lives” against people who might be much like Wales himself: disenfranchised, dispossessed, angry, and armed (Duty 26). In the film, Wales fights his nation’s government; in the present day, my students have taken an oath to defend theirs, and yet Wales’s antistatism is understand- able, even admirable. This tension between personal and professional loyalties lies at the centre of student discussions of the film: How can Wales be a sympathetic character while defying the very system rmcc’s officer cadets represent? Many critics have described as exclusively antistatist, particularly in its connection with the novel that inspired it:

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 65–79 “arch segregationist” Forrest (Asa) Carter’s 1972 Gone to is just one book in a series of fictional works that acted as platforms for Carter’s consistent and “vehement political criticism” (Clayton 20, 21). Carter’s Erika Behrisch Elce true identity as a white supremacist was allegedly unknown “until just is an Associate Professor after the film was released,” but nevertheless the film, like the book, on in the Department of one level “portrays a valorized image of the victimized white American English at the Royal who wreaks havoc on an authoritarian state” (Lowndes 239, 238). Certainly, Military College of Wales spends most of the film evading capture by Union forces, and his Canada. She specializes several escapes from both Union and state-sponsored bounty hunters in nineteenth-century support this antistatist interpretation, implying as they do that happiness literature and culture (and indeed, life) is achievable only beyond state jurisdiction. “Antistatist” but also teaches in the may describe a significant part of the film’s social comment, but not all of common core program it; I would argue instead that, even in its hostility to the imposition of an for all Officer Cadets organized state, the film is still decisively positive about the practice of (the courses in which ethical government. The film’s portrayal of Wales at the centre of a new she includes The Outlaw community—the Crooked River Ranch at Santa Rio—shows that he is not Josey Wales). Her current an anarchist but that he envisions and practises a style of governance that sshrc-funded project is simply (but profoundly) different from the destructive national policy deals with Victorian he experiences at the hands of postwar Unionists. exploration, the British Two philosophical positions enrich our classroom discussion of Wales’s Admiralty, and networks moral standing by offering alternative perspectives on how to view his of influence. profoundly antisocial behaviour, showing it to be, although officially rebel- lious, deeply ethical. The first is the Canadian professional military ethos as articulated in Duty with Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada (2003), a manual that all members of the Canadian Forces, including my students, are required to read and by which they must abide. Duty with Honour calls attention to the necessary direct correlation between national values and military action; officers and non-commissioned members alike “are dedicated to the national values of the country they are sworn to defend,” values grounded in democracy and the rule of law (Duty 21). The government portrayed in Josey Wales, however, represents the destruction of the family unit, and, in rebelling against a system that destroys both his home and his livelihood, Wales does only what is necessary to ensure his own survival and that of others who eventually find themselves under his care. In this context, The Outlaw Josey Wales belongs to a rich tradition of ethical antistatism from Robin Hood to The Hunger Games, in which lone characters take on a hostile state in order to improve the lives of others. Wales’s experience of government as a dehumanizing force (even after the war it continues to hunt him down) leads to the second philosophical entry point, namely Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the suprapolitical pri-

66 | Behrisch Elce macy of individual relationships. According to Levinas, responsibility for the other beyond ties of genetic or political affinity—in other words, for a neutral other Levinas terms “the neighbor”—exists prior to and beyond any externally imposed social order: “the neighbor concerns me before all assumption, all commitment consented to or refused. I am bound to him” (87). Wales the guerilla is a profoundly antisocial character, initially rejecting—and indeed actively destroying—moments of human contact. Wales’s irascibility is understandable, given that most of the characters he encounters see him as an enemy or a prize, and he responds to their advances by isolating himself, both with his gun and his temperament. In spite of himself, however, Wales is eventually re-humanized by his reluctant association with and sense of obligation toward others he sees as more vulnerable than himself. As Levinas admits, “nothing is more burdensome than a neighbor” for the obligation he places one under, but it is this burden “to-be-for-another” that brings out one’s humanity (88, 56). Roger Burrgraeve’s assertion that “the epiphany of the face opens humanity” becomes true for Wales, who responds to the vulnerability of others by putting himself at risk to help them even when it is clearly not in his best interest (82). As Wales struggles to disappear into the Texas wilderness and escape detection, the visibility—and vulnerability—of the non-combatants around him compel his return to the social world in their defence. Wales thus subordinates his rebellion against the national political system to his sense of individual responsibility for others, thereby taking essentially a Levinasian approach to social policy. Recognizing the inherent tyranny of a superimposed social order, Wales negotiates on an individual level for the safety of his community, an action which further suggests a Levinasian understanding that the only possibility for a collec- tive future lies in accepting both “[r]esponsibility for the other [and the suprapolitical primacy of] human fraternity itself” (Levinas 116). Laurence Knapp approaches this argument with his statement that the film offers “an argument for diversity and a culture built on human rather than legal principles,” but I would make a distinction from Knapp in his description of the Crooked River Ranch as a “melting pot” (83). For Levinas, to over- look “the uniqueness of the other” is to invite social violence, precisely what Wales and his companions struggle to avoid (Burrgraeve 83). Wales’s rebellion is necessary in order to build a community that is both “human and humane,” one that keeps room for “pity, compassion, pardon and prox- imity”: the political rebel is the social hero (Burrgraeve 96; Levinas 117).

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 67 A reluctant rebel At first glance, Wales is not an easy hero to champion: his status as an Wales is an armed, angry, white American male fighting on the Confederate side of the Civil War makes him someone a viewer might not consider as particularly insurgent on in need of much sympathy. The film, however, allows for a distinction to be made between what Wales and what the South respectively represent. two levels. Wales homesteads in the bush, but even in the first moments of the film it is clear he is not a Confederate ideologue: his newness is appar- ent in his accent, and his poverty is in his clothes, the size of his plot, and the effort he puts into shouldering his own plough while his young son picks rocks from the field. He carries no gun. More significant than this, I think, is his utter dislocation from the politics that swirl around him: Wales works his farm in an easy silence, and when the posse of “Red Leg” guerilla scouts thunders past him on the way to burning his home and killing his family, Wales first looks to the clear blue sky, confused by the sound of what he thinks is a coming storm. Only when he sees the billowing smoke from his house does he understand the danger. In this sense, I would argue that Wales is shown to be apolitical: by coincidence of geography, he happens to be a Southerner, but the evidence suggests he is no Confederate. Moreover, immediately after this tragedy Wales does not become the “cold-blooded killer … on the side of Satan” some believe he is; after burying his wife and child, he arms himself but stays on his burned-out farm, suggesting, in fact, that his priority is defence rather than offence (Outlaw). Only when a group of Missouri guerrillas chance upon him sitting by his family’s grave does he join the battle, and this with a noncommittal shrug: “Guess I’ll be comin’ with you, then” (Outlaw). In the film’s staging of this scene, he is not a rebel with purpose; he simply has nowhere else to go. If we consider Wales an “Everyman,” Eastwood’s film dramatizes the dehumanizing effects of politics as well as of war; the price on Wales’s head is literally the price, in the words of Unionist Senator Lane, of “winning the peace” (Outlaw). At Civil War’s end, violence across the Missouri border continues unabated, and Lane’s dismissal of postwar Union atrocities attests to the sanctioned abuse of the vulnerable countryside: “to the vic- tors belong the spoils” (Outlaw). There is no denying that Wales is deeply threatening to the Union because of his skill in guerilla tactics and political recalcitrance, but he is also the sole source of hope for the beleaguered set- tlers he encounters on the , those very people the Union claims to support. In this context, Wales is an insurgent on two levels: not only does he continue fighting the government’s attempts to control him

68 | Behrisch Elce but in doing so he also asserts the rights of “ordinary people”—not just the victors—to have safety and prosperity (Haspel 162). The complexity of Wales’s character reflects that of the militarized world he moves through, which is markedly devoid of the “marks of respect” and the collective awareness of “military values” that today define a military in harmony with the society it represents (Duty 21). Betrayal, treachery, and violence are the norm rather than the exception, as well as the only means of survival for people caught between the lines. The film’s political tightrope is exemplified by ferryman Sim Carstairs, who survives the war only by working with both the Union and Confederate armies, transporting soldiers from both sides back and forth across the river according to the war’s ebb and flow. Like Carstairs, who survives by being able “to sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ or ‘Dixie’ with equal enthusiasm,” the film refuses to define any simple binaries between good and evil, and instead its characters prove their moral positions by their actions (Outlaw). Applying clearly defined responsibilities such as those outlined in Duty with Honour—soldiers must remain “dedicated to the national values they are sworn to defend”—to the situations in which Wales finds himself reveal the ethical dilemma at the heart of the film, what Drucilla Cornell terms the “dilemma of what it means to be a good man” in a “complex and violent world” (x, ix). Duty with Honour articulates this difficulty more precisely: the ethical soldier is continually responsible for “making the right choice among difficult alternatives” (31). However, for Wales, the political complexities in the film obscure the moral landscape, making the choice to avoid or engage in violence not only a question of right or wrong but of life or death.

Living by the feud The deep complexity (not to say inconsistency) of the film’s major charac- ters—both its heroes and villains—further blurs the distinctions between good and evil. In the film, appearances are deceiving and no man can be trusted simply because of the position he holds. For instance, Captain Terrill, the film’s arch-villain with his devilish teeth-grinding and carica- tured facial expressions of rage, is actually a professional soldier with a duty to fulfill and the one with whom my students have much—at least officially—in common. Terrill, a former “Red Leg” scout, becomes a Union officer sent by his nation to subdue a former slave-holding countryside that has fallen into chaos;1 his sabre-wielding arm, which kills Wales’s 1 Groups of Red Legs were not part of the regular Union forces but, rather, were a self-organized “unit of Kansas scouts, intended to warn of and defend against

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 69 wife and son and destroys his farm, has literally become “an arm of the elected government” (Duty 9). Terrill’s prowess on a horse and the liberal use of his sabre also links him to an older, more romantic profession of arms. His willingness to engage the gun-toting Wales with his sword as his primary weapon is even reminiscent of the heroes in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the “Noble six hundred” light horsemen who, armed only with swords, rode bravely to their deaths against the heavy cannons of the Russian artillery (55). With his actions implicitly validated by his employment in the Union Army and euphemized as state policy, Terrill’s violent depredations in the South could be defined—according toDuty with Honour—as nothing more than “the ordered, lawful application of military force pursuant to governmental direction” (4). Seen in this way, that government—the victorious Union—has a legitimate responsibility to its citizens to “exercise a monopoly over the use of force within [its] bound- aries,” and this Terrill does on its behalf (Duty 7). Terrill, as described by his Confederate victims, is a “looter and a pillager”; in the words of Senator Lane, however, he is “the regular Federal authority” (Outlaw). Put in the same context that defines my students’ participation in the profession of arms, Captain Terrill has a duty to uphold the Union’s rule of law, to win the peace. According to Duty with Honour, however, professional soldiers are required to “perform their duties with humanity,” and Terrill’s preda- tions on the Southern countryside reveal his lack of “moral commitment” to his profession (29, 44). Terrill may be simply following the orders of his superior officers, and he justifies his violence with the truism “Doin’ right ain’t got no end,” but his actions are shown to be both inhumane and dishonourable (Outlaw). Raping women and burning children in their homes, as Terrill does to Wales’s family, are clearly not activities governed by “the highest standard of discipline, especially self-discipline” required in the profession of arms (Duty 14).2

raids by pro-slavery Missourians” (Haspel 160). Red Legs were in fact the Union- ist equivalent to the Missouri guerilla groups, of which Wales is a member: ac- cording to Clay Mountcastle, “both groups conducted vengeful raids across the [Missouri-Kansas] border to bully, terrorize, and sometimes kill their enemies […] conducting violent surprise attacks that often targeted civilians” (21). Al- though according to Frank Blackmar the group was “never regularly mustered into the service,” Terrill’s acceptance into the newly formed Federal force implies, at least in the world of the film, official acceptance of his atrocities (553). See Mountcastle, Punitive War. 2 In my classes we discuss a powerful ethical counterpoint to Josey Wales: Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Like Wales, Kurtz lives beyond the reach of his government’s oversight but, whereas Wales makes the decision to bind himself to a community, Kurtz kicks “himself loose of the earth,” intentionally

70 | Behrisch Elce Just as Captain Terrill is simultaneously duty-bound and villainous, just as he commits himself to “doin’ right” but fails to adhere “to high ethical standards” required of the professional soldier, the dangerous force that must be subdued in order for America to survive as a unified nation is the film’s eponymous hero (Duty 31). Initially, Wales appears to continue a war that has been declared over as a personal “quest for revenge,” a sentiment seemingly at odds both with his beginning as a farmer and with our expec- tations of him as a sympathetic character (Cornell 140). But Wales’s first rebellion—the reason he is branded an outlaw—is not technically violent: he refuses to surrender to the Unionist soldiers and take the oath of alle- giance to an army that has killed his family. His instinctive distrust of the Union’s political glad-handing proves correct: his former, now unarmed, Missouri riding mates are executed by the Unionists, and Wales alone (apart from Fletcher, his erstwhile leader now hired by the Union to track and kill Wales) escapes physically unhurt. Although Wales is a killer, we can sympathize with his refusal to submit to a political system that has proven itself hostile to the survival of “ordinary people,” as Wales once considered himself (Haspel 162). Like the people he comes eventually to protect, Wales himself is “uprooted, without a country, not an inhabit- ant, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons” (Levinas 91). Indeed, Wales begins the film as one of the many hapless Southern settlers whose farms are destroyed by Unionists, and it is only in the smoking ruins of his hand-hewn home that he finds his gun and becomes a rebel and a killer. Moreover, whereas the film’s political system seems corrupt (a child killer is now the “regular Federal authority”), Wales’s own ethical values ultimately correct its moral trajectory, eventually creating a space for com- munity and life where initially there is only violence from both sides. Looking at Wales as a victim of a dehumanizing political system, the film complicates any easy definition of what a rebel is. If Wales is defined as a political rebel, he is not a moral one. His behaviour is antisocial in terms of political conflict and military control, but in terms of ethics he acts very much within the idealized boundaries of community life. For Wales, rebellion is the only ethical option, for it is only by acting against the state that he can protect himself and others. Wales consistently defends vulnerable strangers, who themselves come to form a small protective

committing atrocities as a way of consolidating personal power (Conrad 2377). Of particular relevance to this discussion is Conrad’s inspiration for Kurtz, the rmcc graduate William Grant Stairs, who committed atrocities similar to Kurtz’s when employed by Leopold, King of the Belgians, to lead an 1891 expedition into Katanga.

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 71 community around him and eventually allow him—through peaceful means, no less—to move beyond the cycle of state-sponsored violence in which he is caught. Surrounded by this new family, Wales’s life is no longer “reduced to combat” but instead returns to the natural cycle of the seasons—the life of the farm—with which the film began (Redmon 316). After the gun, planting, homesteading, and raising a family become once again Wales’s—and his world’s—primary activities. The gun and the plough even intermingle: while Wales’s guerre à outrance compels him to acts of extreme violence against the new nation, it simultaneously allows for its construction, for it gives him and his companions the confidence to defend their new home, “ ’Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win” (Outlaw). The positive results of this rebel- lion are clear: a defunct homestead is reinhabited, and new kinship and community ties are formed. In spite of the body count, Wales remains at heart a farmer, and the peaceful bookends at the film’s start and finish suggest that in fact he is not naturally inclined to violence, a further indi- cation of war’s moral corruption. Rather, Wales uses violence to defend fellow victims in a world where politics cannot protect them (and in fact victimizes them), and in the postwar chaos the Union army seems more intent on running down a dogged farmer than controlling the real out- laws in the region. Indeed, the behaviour of the immoral and ultraviolent , who rob settlers of their property and violate their bodies, is more akin to the behaviour of Captain Terrill than to the man branded a rebel according to law. Although history makes clear the ethical divide between the Union and Confederate sides of the , and Wales fights on the side of “a society that was defined by its devotion to slavery,” the film implies that Wales’s participation in the war is personal rather than politi- cal; he avenges his family rather than defends Southerners’ right to keep slaves and, as previously mentioned, the film makes a point of showing that Wales does not own slaves on his farm (Lowndes 249). As Joseph Lowndes argues, in spite of his affiliations with the Confederates, Wales is still “noble in his moral conduct” (244). Wales’s rebellion is not simply against the nation-state as the Union soldiers represent it but against the limitations of any “political ordering” to respect or protect individuals on the frontier, what Burrgraeve defines as an ethical “crime of desertion” inherent in third-party legislation, and it is in his rejection of national poli- tics in favour of individual “unlimited responsibility” for others that Wales redeems himself (Burrgraeve 83; Levinas 10). Significantly, although the war and the chaos of its aftermath are the forces driving the geographical

72 | Behrisch Elce and political upheaval the film’s characters endure, there is no generaliza- tion of hardship. Rather, each traumatic episode is articulated as unique: the Cherokee Lone Watie lost his wife and son during their forced march on the Trail of Tears; the woman Little Moonlight was a captive Each of both raiders and a white frontier merchant; Laura Lee and Grandma Sarah are Kansas pioneers whose men were killed by Confeder- traumatic ates and Comancheros; Ten Bears’s experience of federal perfidy provides the context in which he accepts Wales’s proposal. Each character’s indi- episode is vidual experience is given equal narrative space, and thus characters are shown in essential fraternity with each other. As well, each has something articulated as meaningful to contribute: Lone Watie deciphers Wales’s strategies and motivations for the others and translates Little Moonlight’s story; Little unique. Moonlight saves Wales’s life on at least one occasion (as does Lone Watie); and Grandma Sarah opens the Crooked River Ranch to everyone who chooses to stay. Instead of documenting the grand movements of armies and policies, the film details the traumatic experiences as well as the resil- ience of individual characters and emphasizes, as Paul Haspel notes, “the way in which war wreaks havoc on innocent lives” regardless of race or geography (162). By the film’s end, distinctions of race or geographical origin are still there, but they exist within the praxis of mutual respect, and Wales’s group of “losers […] immigrants, outcasts, and vagrants”—those, like Wales, on the wrong side of history—forms a happy “multicultural clan” on the frontier (Vaux 5; Lowndes 247).3 For Wales and his companions, state regulation leads to violence and exploitation, and Wales’s rebellion can be seen, through a Levinasian lens, as attempting to move beyond this broken system to one more sensitive to individual human rights. Even though it makes for exciting screen action, Wales’s initial violence immediately after the war is for him neither sat- isfying nor fulfilling because it helps no one; it is a selfish urge based on revenge rather than renewal. This rebellion transforms, however, as his community grows: with his new kin, Wales finds renewed responsibility and therefore a purpose to his rejection of dehumanizing national politics.

3 This awareness of cultural relativity is especially apparent in a number of ex- changes between Grandma Sarah and Lone Watie. As they prepare for their anticipated battle with Ten Bears, Grandma Sarah hoots, “We’re sure gonna show those Redskins somethin’!” Looking at Lone Watie, she holds up her hand in apology: “No offence.” Lone Watie’s tolerant response—“None taken”—is the same that Grandma Sarah gives when this scene is reversed. The final battle at the Ranch occurs when Captain Terrill’s Union Forces come through, and Lone Watie exclaims, as Grandma Sarah loads rifles beside him, “We’re sure gonna show those palefaces somethin’!” (Outlaw).

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 73 The Levinasian priority of the human face illuminates the nature of Wales’s transformation: once the irascible “cold-blooded killer” of the Missouri bush, Wales realizes “that the fate of the other” concerns him each time he is confronted by the vulnerability of his fellow outcasts, beginning with his rescue of the mortally wounded Jamie from the Union camp (Outlaw; Burrgraeve 98). By escaping the encampment with Jamie, Wales gives up his quest for “redemptive violence” in favour of an “ethical duty” to protect the weak and vulnerable (Redmon 316; Burrgraeve 83). As much for the safety of his entourage as for himself, Wales settles in Comancheria, the part of the American frontier most known for hostility to government interference. Still more, Wales negotiates a truce with the under Chief Ten Bears, a man equally as wary as Wales of nationalist political manoeuvring.4 Significantly, the deal Wales makes with Ten Bears resembles neither federal legislation nor formal treaty but is grounded in individual human experience: “Dyin’ ain’t so hard for men like you and me, it’s livin’ that’s hard, when all you ever cared about’s been butchered and raped. Governments don’t live together; people live together. With governments you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well, I’ve come here to give you either one, or get either one from ya” (Outlaw). Wales’s rejection of government policy in favour of human understanding reverberates with the Levinasian definition of human rights as eternal and innate: “It is not because the neighbor would be recognized as belonging to the same genus as me that he concerns me. He is precisely other. The community with him begins in my obligation to him. The neighbor is a brother” (Levinas 87). Burrgraeve elaborates: “we stand in a relationship of solidarity with each other, and with the whole of humanity, here and far away, now and tomorrow, in spite of ourselves” (82). This is not to say, however, that the ranch on the Texas frontier where the characters find themselves represents a bucolic ideal: Grandma Sarah’s son Tom knew what he was doing when he made his home’s roof two feet thick and the window openings crosses for a rifle to pass through. Indeed, as Lowndes points out, it is difficult to tell the difference between the initial, idealized “commune and [the] armed compound” that the ranch becomes as the settlers organize themselves there against attack (248). The Crooked River Ranch is vulnerable to Comanche as well as Union attack, but Wales makes a pact with Chief Ten Bears to protect his new community. Ten Bears and Wales recognize themselves in each other, and 4 Ten Bears, a historical Comanche chief that places Wales on the Texas panhandle, was famous for his leadership in raids against the U.S. Army in northern Texas in the 1860s. See S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon.

74 | Behrisch Elce through a blood pact and their “words of iron” they agree to share the land and its resources (Outlaw). But if the ranch is initially the vulnerable com- munity, it is Ten Bears’s village that remains so, particularly because of its acceptance of the Crooked River Ranch: viewers should recognize the lone building as the first wave of settlement. Indeed, watching the film more than one hundred and thirty years after the settling of northern Texas, we know that the onward march of American engulfed Comancheria shortly after the time in which the film is set. Grandma Sarah and Laura Lee represent the first wave of this postwar national expansion. Before the war, the area where the Crooked River Ranch was located was essentially beyond any American political jurisdiction, Confederate, Union, or Texan. After the war, it was, at least on paper, controlled by national (Unionist) forces, whose generals soon turned their skills to the subjuga- tion of Comancheria and its people. Given Grandma Sarah’s confidence in the Union, it can be assumed that she anticipates both safe passage to and a prosperous future in the panhandle even while the carnage is still being cleared away from the Civil War battlefields. In this sense, Wales represents Union interests in spite of himself. However, with Ten Bears, Wales does not reject the superimposition of national government so much as surpass it, positing a way to live alongside Ten Bears and the Comanche in which individual human life and the dignity of others are not constantly under threat and moving toward what Burrgraeve terms “an even better justice” (93). We know from history that it does not last. Certain aspects of Wales’s character—his poverty, his acceptance of responsibility for the vulnerable—show him to be a sympathetic character in spite of his identity as a rebel. More generally, though, the film opens itself up to criticism in its persistent exclusion of the issue that underpins most explorations of the Civil War: slavery. Indeed, whereas Mexican, Navajo, Cherokee, and Comanche people include themselves in the com- munity that grows around Wales in Texas, no black characters exist at all in the film, even as bit players. Lowndes argues that this is the only way in which audiences can see Wales as a good guy: “the introduction of even one black character (or even an extra) would call into question” not just Wales’s heroism in the film but also his humanity because he comes from Missouri, a Confederate state (249). With the film’s articulation of personal trauma extended to white Americans, Northerners, First Nations people, and Mexicans, the need to establish individual human rights outside of national politics remains paramount, but the articulation of these rights is complicated by the film’s exclusion of the period’s most politically sig- nificant group of American citizens. In Wales’s post–Civil War America,

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 75 black lives remain absent from the film’s story of ethical nation-building. As Eastwood attempts to explain in a later interview about the film, the choice in characterization was one that called attention to “the suffering of the ordinary people of that time, rather than ideology or issues” (Haspel 162). However, this exclusion remains a point of debate for my students, and we discuss whether or not the film posits a fantasy of American history in which black people do not figure at all, perhaps inadvertently perpetuat- ing a racism that on another level the film appears to push against by its inclusion of indigenous characters and stories and the consequences of American manifest destiny on First Nations communities and individuals.

Dying by the pen In Levinasian terms, Wales is an ethical character in part because he understands the profoundly dehumanizing ethical limitations of the politi- cal system organized around him and equally because he moves beyond that system to live as part of a heterogeneous community of individu- als who recognize that their collective humanity resides in their shared responsibility for each other. Wales’s acceptance of great personal risk in order to keep the injured Jamie with him as he tries to escape the Union trackers, to save Little Moonlight from being raped, and likewise to rescue Laura Lee and Grandma Sarah from their captors—even after the latter condemns him as Missouri trash—is to make the ethical decision to accept responsibility for others, to “give, to-be-for-another” despite himself (Levinas 56). Wales’s initial reluctance to get involved with his fellow travelers is natural—as Levinas concedes, “no one is good voluntarily”; it is beyond personal choice—but in each of these scenes Wales responds to what Burrgraeve calls “the ethically ineluctable appeal towards responsibility for the other that proceeds from the [other’s] face” (Levinas 11; Burrgraeve 94). Especially in Wales’s rescue of Little Moon- light, Levinas’s theory of the face is fitting, since Wales watches the first stages of her abuse with a fairly neutral expression and tries to negotiate the purchase of a horse until Little Moonlight, barely visible under the weight of her two would-be rapists, catches his eye and holds it. Although the film’s publicity poster touts the excessively armed Wales as “an army of one,” as the film progresses Wales learns that, in fact, the gun provides neither justice nor security; indeed, its possession and use undermine both. Nor is it the only option for rebellion: Wales comes equally to realize that the “deadly repetition of and violence” is an endlessly repeating cycle only so long as someone is willing to fight (Cornell 147). Although Wales’s gun originally replaces the ploughshare,

76 | Behrisch Elce ultimately the plough is ascendant, the gun becomes redundant, and the American homestead is the site of rejuvenation rather than (and certainly after) trauma. Admittedly, violence seems never far away from Wales—he even leaves the screen with blood slowly seeping from a wound in his Ultimately side—but at the film’s end he heads toward a quieter existence beyond (at least temporarily) the reach of the government that destroyed his first the plough is attempt at community. Some critics maintain Wales’s social ambiguity even to the end, arguing as Cornell does that “we do not actually know ascendant, the what happens” to Wales, whereas others, such as Robert Sickels, feel “it is clear that he not only can go back [to the ranch] but that he will” (Cornell gun becomes 146; Sickels 227). The film offers several compelling reasons for believing the latter: leaking blood, Wales is no longer a self-contained vessel that redundant, and feeds its own rage, and he has killed the man (Captain Terrill) who not only slaughtered his family but who was set on destroying him as well. Tellingly, the American his gun is out of ammunition and, as a student of mine has pointed out, Wales rides into the sunrise, losing what Lone Watie terms his “” as homestead is a Outlaw( ).5 Most importantly, however, Wales’s identity as a rebel is dead when his newfound friends sign an affidavit attesting to his the site of death and rechristen him “Mr Wilson,” an anonymous farmer staking his equally anonymous claim in the wilds of Texas (Outlaw). In terms of the rejuvenation gun’s limitations in the reconstruction of community, his friends’ affidavit shows that it has served its purpose but now is no longer the most power- rather than (and ful force. Although Wales lives by the gun, he dies by the pen, a gesture that anticipates his return to a peaceful existence. If “dyin’ ain’t much of a certainly after) livin’ ” for those sent to track him, for Wales it opens up the best possibility of a future (Outlaw). trauma.

Making good decisions in a complex world The landscape through which The Outlaw Josey Wales pushes its characters is dominated and damaged by politics; significantly, these characters renew the world in which they live not through political policy but by working peacefully together toward a common goal. As Allen Redmon argues of Eastwood’s direction of Mystic River, in Josey Wales there is no “redemptive violence,” no final confrontation with evil that Wales overcomes in order to move smoothly into the future (316). Certainly, Wales’s climactic meeting with Captain Terrill appears to offer this kind of resolution: in killing him Wales finally overcomes “the oppression or threat imposed by [the] ‘evil’ ” that Terrill represents (316). However, the scene of Terrill’s killing is not

5 Thank you to Officer Cadet Connor McKay for this insightful observation.

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 77 the end of the film, nor the proof of Wales’s salvation. What ends the film is the community’s “killing” of Wales himself through his friends’ little lie. Fletcher’s final statement, “the war is over,” is made not in celebration of Terrill’s death or as a conclusion to a glorious final confrontation but as a conscious rejection of violence as a way of life (Outlaw). When reject- ing that violence, Fletcher looks directly into the eyes of the man he was hired to hunt, the man who has just killed his partner. Fletcher’s own “epiphany of the face,” rather than Terrill’s death, saves Wales and allows him to do what he had intended when he first refused to submit to Union authority: escape. An unarmed Wales exits the screen, and the battle is not won but is simply over. More importantly, Wales escapes from his cycle of death to the cycle of life on the Santa Rio farm. Wales’s return to his homesteading life allows for the reconstruction, literally, of a new world, a new united state; he is a builder of homes and families, not a destroyer of them. Moreover, Wales’s active engagement with his ragtag group of outcast settlers makes him an ethical nation-builder, for it is through such social responsibility that we create “the condition, the foundation and the inspiration of every human and humane society” (Burrgraeve 96). For my students the original conundrum concerning ethical behaviour in a time of war remains, but not having an answer can be as valid—if not more so—than having clear direction; being aware of the moral hazards inherent in the profession of arms is the first step toward making ethi- cal choices. Their best recourse is not just to Duty with Honour, the text that articulates the foundation of ethical decision-making in war, but to think about how such unlimited liability can intersect with a heightened awareness of individual circumstance—of self, other, combatant, and non-combatant—in the execution of their official duties, the enactment of national policy in an often hostile field. Applying the film’s insistence on the validity of an individual’s rights—and each individual’s abiding responsibility to “be-for-another, despite oneself”—in the field may prove to be a great challenge, but all the more worthy of undertaking for the possibilities it presents (Levinas 56).

Works Cited

Blackmar, Frank, ed. Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, vol 2. Chicago: Standard Publishing Company, 1912. Burrgraeve, Roger. “The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as the Surpassing of Political Rationality.” Human Rights Review (January–March 2005): 80–101.

78 | Behrisch Elce Clayton, Lawrence. “Forrest Carter/Asa Carter and Politics.” American Literature 21.1 (Spring 1986): 19–26. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. 8th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 2328–86. Cornell, Drucilla. and Issues of American Masculinity. 4th ed. New York: Fordham up, 2009. Duty with Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada. Kingston: Cana- dian Forces Leadership Institute, 2003. Gwynne, S. C. Empire of the Summer Moon. New York: Scribner, 2010. Haspel, Paul. “Studies in Outlawry: The Strange Career of Josey Wales.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22 (2005): 155–67. Knapp, Laurence. Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films Analyzed. Jefferson: McFarland, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Lowndes, Joseph E. “Unstable Antistatism: The Left, the Right, and The Outlaw Josey Wales.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16.2 (2002): 237–53. Mountcastle, Clay. Punitive War: Confederate Guerillas and Union Reprisals. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009. The Outlaw Josey Wales. Screenplay by . Dir. Clint East- wood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, , and . 1976. Warner Home Video, 2001. Redmon, Allen. “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s and Mystic River.” The Journal of American Culture 27.3 (2004): 315–28. Sickels, Robert C. “A Politically Correct Ethan Edwards: Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales.” Journal of Popular Film and Television (2003): 220–27. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1854.The Nor- ton Anthology of English Literature, vol E. 8th ed. Eds. Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 1188–89. Vaux, Sara Anson. The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

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