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Chapters (23)
  1. ALSO BYFIONA SNYCKERS
  2. LACUNA
  3. PROLOGUE
  4. CHAPTER 1
  5. CHAPTER 2
  6. CHAPTER 3
  7. CHAPTER 4
  8. CHAPTER 5
  9. CHAPTER 6
  10. CHAPTER 7
  11. CHAPTER 8
  12. CHAPTER 9
  13. CHAPTER 10
  14. CHAPTER 11
  15. CHAPTER 12
  16. CHAPTER 13
  17. CHAPTER 14
  18. CHAPTER 15
  19. CHAPTER 16
  20. CHAPTER 17
  21. CHAPTER 18
  22. CHAPTER 19
  23. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One of the most discussed aspects of John Coetzee’s novel has been the complete absence of the raped woman’s voice in the narrative. Indeed, the rape takes place off-stage in the manner of the ancient Greek tragedians. Critics have called this a deliberate “lacuna” in the novel—a gap more powerful in its absence than it would have been in its presence.

My name is Lucy Lurie, and I am that lacuna.

CHAPTER 1

A lacuna is an unfilled space or gap.
My vagina is a lacuna that my attackers filled with their penises. They saw the lack in me and chose to supply what I couldn’t. Their penises were rough and dry and scraped my lacuna raw, bruising my cervix, and tearing my perineum.

Sometimes I dream that my rape is happening off-stage—in the manner of the ancient Greek tragedians. I am lying in another room and listening to it. I can hear my cries of pain—loud at first, then softening to whimpers. I can hear their grunts of frustration and triumph. One of them manages to ejaculate, which he does with a roar of victory.

I can’t feel what is happening or even see it, except in my imagination. The soundtrack on the other side of the wall lets me know how far they have progressed. Now they are taking a break. Now they have got their second wind and are starting again.

It is less harrowing than being in that room myself. Experi­encing something at one remove is a pale shadow of the real thing. The ancient Greek tragedians were wrong if they thought that leaving the rough stuff to the readers’ imaginations was more effective than rubbing our noses in it.

But perhaps that wasn’t their intention at all. Perhaps they simply thought it was more genteel to keep ugliness off the stage. No one wants to watch stomach-turning violence at the theatre, especially over dinner. It can be very upsetting.

Was that what Coetzee was doing? Was he being genteel—tiptoeing around the sensibilities of his readers? Or did he believe it would be more effective for the rape to take place off-stage in the arena of the reader’s imagination? Coetzee apologists have suggested that he was making a feminist point by leaving that lacuna unfilled in the text—that he was illustrating how rape victims are stripped of agency and denied a voice.

I see it as a lacuna in his own literary imagination. He does not supply details on the page because his imagination failed him when it came to describing what happened to me.

You don’t want to hear this, do you? There is nothing more tedious than a rageful harpy ranting about some cherished grievance. It’s so 1981. So Andrea Dworkin. So Catharine MacKinnon.

Let me tell you what John Coetzee was like as a colleague instead.