Lacuna opens with an especially peculiar writer’s notice. Fiona Snyckers informs the reader that her guide just isn't a retelling of Shame (1999) by the Nobel prize-winning South African novelist JM Coetzee, however that it does have an “intertextual relationship” with that harrowing, controversial and much-garlanded novel. Lacuna will function a personality referred to as John Coetzee who's “completely fictional” and one other referred to as Lucy Lurie who, like her namesake in Shame, is the white sufferer of gang rape by black males however is in any other case “authentic and fictional”.
“I exploit the character of Lucy to discover the phenomenon of white feminism in South Africa,” she publicizes. For Lucy is “trapped in her personal racism and unconscious biases”. She is “solipsistic and egocentric”. She makes “flawed life decisions” and “practises a shallow type of feminism that doesn't bear in mind intersectionality”.
Are you able to think about if all authors framed their books on this method? “Anna Karenina will make some unhealthy decisions on this guide.” “Captain Ahab acts out a dangerous type of masculinity that doesn't bear in mind the sentiments of the whale.” It might be that such prescriptions are extra widespread in younger grownup fiction, the place Snyckers made her identify, however her tone jogged my memory extra of a Soviet compendium of English writers that my husband as soon as introduced again from Russia, which introduces Wilde, Waugh and Wells with stern warnings about how a superb communist is predicted to interpret them. Solely: what are we to make of her insistence that this sufferer of gang rape is “solipsistic and egocentric”? Is that this some sort of postmodern joke? I don’t know.
Even though Lacuna is extra closely signposted than the M25, I’m nonetheless not completely certain what it’s making an attempt to say. It purports to be a feminist response to Coetzee’s novel, however it muddies the waters by rewriting the story of Shame and its invention in a number of basic methods.
This model takes place within the current day relatively than the extra instantly post-apartheid setting of Shame. Lucy Lurie just isn't an earthy lesbian collectivist however a heterosexual junior tutorial who teaches in the identical college division as John Coetzee in Cape City. The actual-life Coetzee had already written a number of acclaimed novels by the point he wrote Shame. Right here, Coetzee is a sexist previous fart approaching tutorial obscurity. Nonetheless, when he hears of his younger colleague’s brutal rape at her father’s farm, inspiration strikes and, to everybody’s shock, he produces a world bestseller.
The novel opens two years after the assault that made Lucy, 28, “South Africa’s number-one rape sufferer”. She is livid that Coetzee handled her trauma as a metaphor for the overthrow of white supremacy in South Africa and turns into intent on confronting him about it. She is equally outraged that Coetzee selected to not describe the rape scene in his novel, leaving as an alternative a “lacuna” – an area unfilled by ladies’s voices. “I'm no person’s lacuna,” she insists.
Snyckers introduces a variety of discrepancies. Right here, Lucy is raped by six males versus three (was three not sufficient?). She takes the morning after tablet whereas the Lucy in Shame decides towards terminating her being pregnant after the assault. And whereas her father, David, is an ex-academic who was dismissed from his place due to sexual misconduct, on this model it was his farm relatively than Lucy’s that burned down, main him to turn out to be fixated on the insurance coverage declare.
The plot twist, when it arrives, just isn't in itself ridiculous however the execution is, primarily as a result of Snyckers is just too caught up in her political messaging to discover the emotional implications. She appears to think about that giving voice to a rape sufferer means lowering all the opposite characters to crude antagonists. Her father turns into evil; her finest pal, Moira, is a compendium of each insensitive factor you may say to make a traumatised rape sufferer snap out of it (“Don’t you ever get attractive, Lucy?”).
And the meat with Coetzee is basically misguided. Her misreading centres on the false concept that the rape in Shame features completely as a handy post-apartheid metaphor and that Lucy’s choice to maintain the kid is a fantasy on Coetzee’s half a couple of completely satisfied mixed-race South African future unencumbered by historical past.
The unique novel is subtler, bleaker, extra ambivalent. Any sense of redemption for the characters is blended up with spoil. You'll be able to interpret Lucy’s choice to maintain the kid in a variety of alternative ways: as a radical act of forgiveness, as a bizarre type of white reparation, as a method of punishing her father and even merely as an assertion of the company that Snyckers appears satisfied that she lacks. And it’s not as if the Lucy in Shame is missing in self-awareness. “You behave as if all the pieces I do is a part of the story of your life,” Lucy tells her father at one level. “You're the fundamental character, I'm a minor character who doesn’t make an look till midway by way of.” It’s Coetzee who invitations the feminist retelling.
There’s one other discrepancy that’s onerous to account for too. Regardless of Snycker’s fondness for phrases corresponding to “intersectionality” and “white fragility”, and her concern about feminine voices being erased, she has fully written out the character of Melanie Isaacs, the scholar who's coerced (and arguably, on one event, raped) by David Lurie. In Shame, she is known as “the darkish one” and lots of critics have interpreted that as that means she is black or blended race. That is the occasion that provides the guide its title.
Maybe it might have helped if Coetzee had spelled all this out in large capital letters initially.
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