The ogre and the child – Consent, by Vanessa Springora

‘Literature is above moral judgement, but it is our responsibility as publishers to point out that sex between an adult and a person who has not reached the age of sexual consent is a reprehensible act punishable by law.’

With these words, Vanessa Springora brings to a remarkable close her autobiographical novel which, in 2020, will shake up the literary world and French society in general.

Consent is a book that could be read in two hours, caught up in the gripping story it reveals, but which in fact requires the necessary pauses to assimilate the intensity of the words and the testimony they bear. Intense because it is so well written, it tells the story of Vanessa Springora, a writer, editor and film-maker who was a young girl of 14 at the time, and of how Gabriel Matzneff, a well-known writer in his 50s, forced her to live with him.

More than 30 years after the events, Vanessa Springora takes up her pen to write. To write the suffering, the shame, the attention. Describing the facts, her life, Matzneff’s letters and his body as father and lover at the same time, the strangeness of a relationship that, after reading the book, no one can describe as truly consensual, her mother’s choice not to get involved, the irresponsibility of the adults who were supposed to protect her as a child.

It’s an outlet, a ‘medicine book’. An emotional book for the writer, but one that also teaches her readers, whose stories are sometimes echoed in it. About the law, about those who defended Matzneff and signed a pro-paedophilia petition he wrote in 1977 to decriminalise relations between adults and children, from Simone de Beauvoir to Bernard Kouchner to Louis Aragon.¹ This book is about the literary world, a world that protects even those who have attacked others, confusing the liberation of morals with what remains, quite rightly, a crime. This book also makes us reflect on the distinction, in this case impossible, between the man and the artist, Matzneff’s unhealthy experiences in the city fuelling his work on stage.

The autobiographical dimension of the work makes it intimate, but in a good way. Without lapsing into melodrama, Springora exposes the terrible situation with sharp words: that of a predator hunting its prey, because that’s what it is: the pursuit of an ‘ogre’, as she calls him, on a child, the psychological hold of an adult man on the brain and emotions of a secondary school pupil. Throughout her book, she does not mention his name, simply referring to him as G.M., the man whose paedophilia served as the basis for much of his work and who, thanks to or in spite of it, achieved widespread literary success.

Through her words, Springora heals those who also recognise themselves in her experience. Those who still feel guilty after reading her text. ‘Why couldn’t a fourteen-year-old girl love a man thirty-six years older? A hundred times I had turned this question over in my mind. Without realising that it was badly put, right from the start. It wasn’t my own attraction that needed to be questioned, but his’.² With these few sentences, she removes all responsibility from the victims, pointing out that the fault lies entirely with the adult who manipulated her as a child for several years.

This relationship was confining while it lasted, but even more so afterwards, when she had to put up with seeing him, her tormentor, shine on television or in bookshops, while she was not listened to, having to live with the weight of those painful teenage years, having lived too early a youth that would be stolen from her by a man whose success she would unwittingly participate in – because, in fact, Matzneff’s relationship with Springora was a subject of inspiration for some of the writer’s works.

Condemned for having her words and image exposed for Matzneff’s benefit, and desperate to break out of this circle, Springora finally finds an answer: ‘For so many years, I’ve been going round in circles in my cage, my dreams populated by murder and revenge. Until the day when the solution finally appeared, right there in front of me, as if it were obvious: catch the hunter in his own trap, lock him up in a book’.³

What’s more, it’s a brilliant book that should be urgently read.

Translated by Gabriel Capitolo and Emma Le Helley.