Lucy’s Precarious Privilege in Fiona Snyckers’s Lacuna

Abstract

The article applies both Judith Butler’s notion of precarity and her Freudian approach to an analysis of Fiona Snyckers’s novel Lacuna (2019a). Using Freudian psychoanalysis to analyse the structure of Lucy’s trauma and to trace the process of her healing, I argue that, although the process is uneven and its outcome partial, it traces a movement from the darkness of her trauma to the illumination, following her name, of its cause as part of the process of healing. Although she claims her novel gives voice to Lucy, the silenced rape survivor of J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Snyckers has been accused of silencing the voices of the black victims of sexual violence and exploitation – those most exposed to precarity. However, I argue that one of Snyckers’s central concerns is to critique the privileges enjoyed by the white middle class.