The second diagnosis comes from the resident gynaecologist. V. declares that she is having trouble giving herself fully to a “lovely boy” (Consent; HarperCollins, 2021, 63). (Her lover has no issue with the inability to penetrate, and has for weeks been sufficiently satisfied with fondling her entire body). The gynaecologist examines her and confirms, “gladly and happily, that [she was] indeed a ‘Virgin incarnate,’ for he had never seen a hymen so intact” (63).
While the psychologist fails to offer a concrete course of action, the gynaecologist is more pragmatic. He proposes making a small incision in V.’s hymen so that she can finally enter the pleasurable world of sex. He appears self-congratulatory: he has secured her sexual freedom, an autonomy oh-so-dear to liberal-minded Parisians in the decades that followed the protests of May 1968.
A key detail: V.’s “lovely boy” (63) is in fact a man in his late forties. Referred to as “G.” in the memoir, he is easily recognisable as the Renaudot-winning author Gabriel Matzneff, known for his countless novels and essays on his serial seduction of adolescent girls and prepubescent boys.
Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement (Consent; Éditions Grasset, 2020) sold around 75,000 copies in its first weeks on the shelves. With this memoir of abuse, Springora has triumphed where others, most notably Canadian writer Denise Bombardier and French writer/survivor Francesca Gee, have been scorned for their attempts to expose Matzneff’s predatory lifestyle. The immense success of Springora’s memoir hinges on its publication during a decisive moment in the history of feminism in France. In 2018, as women’s testimonies flooded public debate across the globe, a group of one hundred women—all well-known figures in France (authors, actresses, singers etc.)—famously published an open letter in Le Monde. The authors defended the freedom of men to “bother” others and express their sexuality without excessive punishment. For the Le Monde hundred, this freedom is inextricable from women’s freedom, power and agency to say “no.” Springora’s narrative works against this view: she suggests that sexual freedom is not absolute and that some are not empowered enough to say “no.”
Consent caused a great scandal; it even had legal consequences. On 3 January 2020, Paris’s public prosecutions office opened an investigation into Matzneff’s sexual relations with minors over the decades. A little over a year later, France introduced a law deeming that minors under the age of fifteen are legally unable to consent (previously, the plaintiff had to prove that consent was forcibly obtained). And in October 2023 there was a second investigation into Matzneff’s paedophilic activities. While Matzneff lingers in exile on the Italian Riviera—his books withdrawn from print, his allies dwindling—Consent has been adapted to the stage and the screen. All these developments have created a somewhat sensationalised environment around the memoir.
There is much to consider beneath this sociopolitical furore. Springora tackles philosophically charged topics as France grapples with evolving debates on the entanglement of sexuality, power and art. Is consent still—or was it ever—an ideal means of unravelling the complexities of abuse? Does art help or hinder the most vulnerable among us?
In her translation, Natasha Lehrer transmits Springora’s portrayal of the codified milieu of the post-1968 Parisian Left Bank. Her attentive work effectively conveys Springora’s timely messages on the possibilities and limitations of two slippery concepts: consent and art.
*
Consent. Yes. An unequivocal, enthusiastic “yes” is a far better marker of consent than simply neglecting to say “no.” This distinction moves past a deeply regressive logic: if one doesn’t say “no,” then it’s full steam ahead. Affirmative consent, which emerged in the 1990s, was something of a watershed moment for feminism. But in the post-#metoo era, the concept has been treated with increasing ambivalence.
Springora intervenes in this debate. The memoir asks whether we can reasonably expect a child to disentangle fatherly love from that of a paedophile. And it answers “no” by staging a protagonist, V., who is still in the process of learning what love is, what sex means, and how both are regularly wielded as tools of manipulation.
Throughout her childhood, V. adores her mother, but her father’s absence has carved a void in her life. “[A]t the grand old age of five, I am waiting for love” (3), Springora writes. Later, in the years following her parents’ separation, she waits in vain for her father to be there, to turn up for dinner and make the hours of waiting at the restaurant worth it. When he doesn’t show, the waiters pay for her taxi home, sometimes as late as ten at night. On the few occasions he does turn up, V. appears to remember little more than a belly dancer wiggling her hips around the restaurant, around her father, as he tucks some cash into her outfit.
By the time she is on the cusp of adolescence, V. doesn’t “understand the first thing about love” (14). Like many her age, she is sexually curious. She also has “a pronounced taste for reading” (24). This only makes her more vulnerable to her abuser.
A present father, love, literature. These are the things that V. needs in her life at that time. These are the blanks G. seeks to fill. These are the reasons that V. says “yes.”
Their first encounter occurs when V. is fourteen, seated for dinner among several literary figures of 1980s Paris. The entire evening, she feels his gaze on her. He flashes her a smile, which she confuses “for a paternal smile, because it was the smile of a man, and [she] no longer had a father” (28). G. is charming, and terrifically at ease at this “dîner mondain” (Le Consentement, 40).
In her translation, Lehrer is alert to the idiosyncrasies of this cultivated Left Bank setting. She does not directly translate Springora’s expression “dîner mondain” as a “worldly,” “sociable,” or “sophisticated” dinner. Instead, she writes that G. “had an instinctive mastery of the strictly codified rules of Parisian social interaction” (28). With this, she imparts G.’s social and cultural prowess. The literary milieu of the Parisian Left Bank is his domain. To V., who spends her time buried in books, this is important. Later, she boasts to her father of her literary lover: “‘you can go now, and carry on living your little life in peace without me’ . . . ‘he’s a writer, he’s wonderful, and the most amazing thing is, he loves me’” (61).
Springora is clear: V. unequivocally says “yes.” She consents to have sex with G., to live in his apartment, to skip school. V. knows that her lifestyle with him isn’t typical for a girl under the age of sixteen, that it’s not “normal . . . to find yourself in his bed at teatime with his penis in her mouth” (97). But Springora shows that consent is an insufficient barometer of abuse.
This ambivalence toward consent emerges in large part through the split narrative voice. The reader is thrust into the mind of the young V., who desires love and is thrilled when it finally comes her way—from a writer, no less! At the same time, the reader intuits the compassionate voice of Springora, an adult, who conveys V.’s perspective while condemning the milieu of her youth that was complicit in her abuse: “I instinctively understood that the fact that no one ever expressed surprise at the situation meant the world around me was out of kilter” (98).
This dual subjectivity emerges most often through the memoir’s repeated references to literature. V., ever the bookworm, lives her almost two-year relationship with G. first as a fairy tale and later as a fable gone awry. Springora makes this point from the outset: “Fairy-tales are an age-old source of wisdom . . . Red Riding Hood ought be wary of the wolf and his cajoling voice; Sleeping Beauty ought to keep her finger far from the irresistible temptation of the spindle; Snow White ought to evade the hunters, and nothing on earth should tempt her to take a bite from the oh-so-red, mouthwatering apple that fate holds out to her. / So many warnings that every child would be wise to follow to the letter” (vii). With this prologue, Springora suggests that her memoir follows the ominous narrative arc of children’s stories. She thus camps the reader in the innocent mind of V.—in a world of fairy tales. Through references to the literary, Springora frames her youthful self as ill-equipped to heed the warnings in her threadbare volume of the collected works of the Brothers Grimm.
Words are sanctuary; words are acute points of vulnerability. Words are how G. worms his way into V.’s life. After their first encounter at dinner, G. begins to write letters to V. And what could be more reminiscent of a fairy tale? V.’s Prince Charming is a writer of literature and of love letters—to her! After initial hesitation, she eventually responds to his insistent missives. With language redolent of an Ovidian myth, Springora portrays V. as a victim who is as powerless as a hunted nymph: “No sooner had I nibbled at the bait than G. pounced” (33).
Literature is G.’s weapon for abuse. A turning point in the narrative is the moment that he writes a school assignment in V.’s place. She receives praise and excellent marks from her teacher. Through this act, G. takes away V.’s words and, Springora writes, gains his “stranglehold” (65).
Matzneff’s career was founded on his literary musings of his life and loves. For years, he “collected” his young lovers through his writing. He boastfully writes of how he seduces them, and often includes their letters and photographs in his work and on his website. His victims are not only sexual objects; they are literary objects.
In 2021, Matzneff self-published a work in response to Consent. In the tellingly titled Vanessavirus, he positions himself as the victim of Springora’s puritanical attack on their heavenly love affair. Ironically, Matzneff’s latest publication reiterates a key point that Springora makes in her memoir: he uses writing to control those around him, often by positioning himself as a righteous victim. Matzneff also claims to be a champion for the rights of minors by persistently defending their innate freedom to love and be loved. Springora, in her postscript, writes that Matzneff’s works “constitute an explicit apology for child sexual abuse” (187).
In Consent, G. forbids V. to read his most scandalous texts. V. obeys for a short time. Like a wife poking around the corridors of Bluebeard’s castle, she seeks out his pornographic portrayals of his relationships with minors. Repulsed, she comes to realise that she might soon share the fate of her predecessors—minors who are now characters in his books. G. has, at this point, indeed already begun to write about her, transforming her identity and their relationship into marks on a page. As a result, V. comes to experience a complete “dispossession” (69) of herself. Her abuser uses his literary prowess to reduce her to a two-dimensional être de papier—a being-of-paper. Like Pygmalion, G. moulds his erotic objects into works of art.
G. continues to publish books about their relationship after V. ends it. Troublingly, she comes to question whether she even has a body: “What proof did I have of my existence? Was I even real? In an attempt to figure this out once and for all, I stopped eating” (155). V. develops an eating disorder, becomes light, floats through air, glides across space in a starvation-induced blur. Her flesh and blood, if she has any, are no more than the stuff of books: “My body was made of paper, ink flowed through my veins, my organs didn’t exist. I was a fiction” (155).
It takes years for V. to rebuild her sense of self, let alone learn what love and sex feel like in a nourishing partnership. For a time, she escapes the world of words that has so long entrapped her. Later, she chooses to return to pursue a career in publishing. She becomes successful and, in 2019, is appointed director of the prestigious Éditions Julliard (the same publisher of Matzneff’s well-known essay, titled Les moins de seize ans—The Under Sixteens (1974)).
At the end of the memoir, the two subjectivities—protagonist and author, V. and Springora, child and adult—finally converge: Springora writes Consent and becomes the author that she was probably supposed to be a long time ago.
*
Springora’s memoir challenges a specific legacy of feminism in France. In 1970, French feminists, in part spurred by the 1968 protests, founded the Mouvement de libération de femmes (MLF). The group successfully campaigned for contraception and abortion, as well as professional and parental parity. They fought tooth and nail for the sexual freedom of all. But the post-1968 logic emerges with shocking obstinance in the 2018 open letter in Le Monde opposing the #metoo movement. In the letter, the authors claim that men and women are equally free to express and refuse desire; if all are free to give and deny consent, the act of saying “yes” or “no” is as simple as that. Feminists still champion sexual freedom at all costs. An example is the prominent author and art critic Catherine Millet, one of the Le Monde hundred, who Matzneff cites as one of his last remaining supporters.
With Consent, Springora attacks this strand of contemporary feminism by showing that all individuals are not equally free. Some cannot make informed decisions about their desires: “Vulnerability is precisely that infinitesimal space into which people with the psychological profile of G. can insinuate themselves. It’s the element that makes the notion of consent so beside the point” (145). V. lives in a world of fairy tales, in which paternal love can be twisted into a predatory form of loving. But the situation is not so different in the real world. In the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the 1980s, Matzneff was protected by the intellectual mores of the period that defended sexuality to an absolute degree.
Where was V.’s mother through all of this? She was sitting beside her daughter at the dîner mondain. Though initially taken aback, and possibly jealous, V.’s mother quickly comes to support G.’s relationship with her daughter. Why? Springora writes: “I was the daughter of a feminist of the May ‘68 generation” (103).
Literature is the beginning and the end of Springora’s memoir of abuse. It is the tool that G. first wields to manipulate V., but it is also the means through which Springora finally exposes Matzneff. Springora writes that for years she remained, as most survivors do, locked in the “cage” that her abuser crafted. She found a way to move forward with this same enclosure: “Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” (viii). Springora’s final words appear to address her perpetrator directly: “See, it can’t be that hard” (187).
