To Megan Lynch whose brilliance and magical literary zeal made it happen, Eleanor Kriseman, and everyone at Ecco whose incredible support brought the book into the physical world.
To Arthur Flowers, George Saunders, and Dana Spiotta, three brilliant points of light who led the way.
To the Fabulous Five: Rachel Abelson, Mildred Barya, Martin De Leon, Rebecca Fishow, and Dave Nutt whose incisive feedback and fantastic work goaded/inspired me.
To the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program for the space and time to read, to write, to be an artist.
To Carmen Amaya, my prophet and earliest reader.
To Paul Cody who was the first to go to the mat.
To Anais Koivisto, my moral center and artistic high tide.
To Linda Longo, my fairy godmother.
To Ben Marcus who plucked me out of obscurity.
To Stephen Squibb who fed me whiskey and always made me feel it was gonna happen.
To Jessie Torrisi who let me slip stories under her door.
To Baron Vaughn, my brother and best friend.
To Ryan Senser and Team 383 who were my haven.
To Leo Allen who introduced me to the mysterious workings of the S.S.S.C.
To Melissa Cleary Pearson and Vineeta Shingal whose great hearts made a small, crucial donation.
To the Colgate Writers Conference who told me I was a writer.
To Andrew Milward, Steven Barthleme and the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi; Charlie Baxter and the Breadloaf Writers Conference.
To The American Reader, Granta.com, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Cupboard, Fence, and Bryan Hurt.
To my family who loved and made me.
To Julian Isaiah whose imminent arrival forced me to finish the book.
Last and Most to Christopher Brunt “. . . when I touch you / in each of the places we meet / in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying / and resurrected.” ~ Bob Hicok
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHANELLE BENZ has published short stories in The American Reader, Fence, and The Cupboard, and on Granta.com, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
CREDITS
COVER ART AND DESIGN BY SARA WOOD
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE MAN WHO SHOT OUT MY EYE IS DEAD. Copyright © 2017 by Chanelle Benz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition January 2017 ISBN 9780062490766
ISBN 9780062490759
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1Appears in the French translation as “Alela.”
2The earliest edition attests to a far more implicit positivism, arguably a glass half-full tone, emphasized in the substitution of “yes?” for “no?”
3Here, punishment. There is yet another edition, likely from the turn of the century and, as such, establishes that upon meeting the children, Adela applies a poultice to their wounds, thereby tinging her kindness with practices of the occult.
4A Gothic novel by Byron’s jilted lover Lady Caroline Lamb, that Byron himself reviled as a “Fuck and Publish” in which the innocent, Calantha (the avatar for Lamb), is seduced by the evil antihero, Glenarvon (a thinly veiled portrayal of Byron). Both Calantha and Lamb were subsequently ruined.
5See Mamney, “In works such as Shakespeare’s Othello, the female character is a canvas onto which the male character ejaculates his fears of emasculation and desire for dominance.”
6The reference to Beau Brummell (1778–1840), the innovator of the modern man’s suit and inspiration of the Dandy movement, many scholars believe, infers that Quilby will not suffer Brummell’s profligate fate of dying penniless and mad.
7Nineteenth-century audiences suspected that Adela suffered from syphilis. This disease was thought to result in hardened lesions on the trunk, which serves to give a double resonance to “thornback.”
8This negation of their mother’s sexuality is an example of the male policing the children engage in to mediate any potentially disruptive female power.
9An oblique reference to Percy as a dissolute alcoholic.
10Yet another veiled barb as to Adela’s sexual depravity, for since the success of Emperor Augustus’s propaganda machine, Cleopatra has long been portrayed as oversexed.
11This trope was frequently used to denote a “wild child,” however in the context of the Byronic hero discourse, the children are referring to the acute chronic melancholy of Percy’s ruttish dissipation.
12Adela is revealing that, by bringing his agenda of disharmony upon her, Percy is threatening to dismantle her authenticity with his financial cacophony.
13Such vernacular as “merry”-ness suggests that Adela’s “merry” sexual misconduct has been enjoyed since birth.
14Note the children’s conception of Adela’s bastardy approaches deformity.
15Adela, lighting the way for Wuthering Heights, is known to have thoroughly inspired Charlotte Brontë to pay homage in the creation of Heath-cliff, the construction of Moor as man, allowing Brontë to position the subaltern as the vessel of violent agency.
16This fluidity in their conception of race typically predates the nineteenth century and is most often found in the eighteenth century, when skin color was a less fixed secondary identity marker. For a charming and oft incisive exploration of this, see Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture.
17A Creole female, which Adela has now claimed as her identity, was commonly depicted in the discourse of white colonial domination as lascivious and unstable due to the West Indian heat.
18This carries the connotation of Percy’s animalistic virility astride Adela’s noble savagery. See Dowd, whose Barbarous Beasts, White Toys, and Hybrid Paternities: Considerations on Race and Sexuality in the Caribbean examines these tensions.
19This accusation hearkens to the seemingly fixed, misogynist association between West Indian women and black magic which was stereotypical during the period in which �
��Adela” was composed.
20In the first German translations, it is curious to note that “she” rather than “he” dies.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead Page 19
