VANESSA GRAELL
@VaneGraell
Barcelona
Tuesday, 15 September 2020 - 15:55
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Cesar Awards.
The controversy with Polanski
leaving high school, a 50-year-old man waits for a 14-year-old girl. He is not his father.
He takes her to the hotel where they have lived together for months.
It is not the first (nor will it be the last): before there have been other adolescents, even 12-year-olds in Manila.
She has written it in several of her books such as Los under 16 years (1974) which is directly an apology for pedophilia and which was reissued in 2005.
The writer Gabriel Matzneff is today 83 years old, has more than 50 published books and several literary awards.
It has never been hidden.
But the 14-year-old girl has grown up and now she is the one who tells the story in
The Consent
(Lumen), an editorial tsunami that has left France in
shock.
It sold out in two days and has already been sold to more than 20 countries.
Lumen publishes in Spain the phenomenon of Vanessa Springora, who works as editorial director for Julliard and is almost the same age as Matzneff when he met a girl of only 13 years (to whom he sent love letters and stalked on the street). takes his literary revenge.
With cold, almost surgical prose, Springora hunts down the predator, enclosing him in a book as he did with the teenager.
But she not only speaks of her own consent, that of a girl in love with the great intellectual, but that of an entire society, that of the post-May 68 with her forbidden prohibition.
An entire era that fell silent.
And she consented.
Did it take you 30 years to be able to tell your story?
I started writing it when my son was approaching 13 years old.
I have needed time and maturity to overcome and explain this story, so that it did not destabilize my personal and professional life.
If I had written it five years after everything happened it would have been much more violent.
I have needed a distance of 30 years to create a more measured and nuanced literary object, a cry, a revenge ...
But it is not just a rematch against Matzneff.
She is a 'J'accuse' of an entire society: her teachers knew it, the staff of the pediatric hospital where she was admitted and even the Juvenile Brigade who saw her with him ... Yes, there is a dimension of denunciation.
But it is not a hate book but rather a question mark.
All the institutions of the time failed, starting with my family and my close circle, my institute, the police, the justice system, the hospital ... They did not do their job of protecting the minor.
Luckily things have changed.
If the book has had such an impact in France, it is because mentalities have changed.
The only class that was still a bit reticent is that of literature and the media.
Has literature been above the moral? The issue was confronted with the question of freedom of expression.
But my goal is not to censor literary works or to prevent artists from going beyond morality.
What is subversive about this book is that it overthrows an established order to protect a man who was manifestly a pedophile and a criminal.
In the name of literature they have allowed him to act alongside his books, which are a praise of pedophilia.
He has raped children in underdeveloped countries and has hurt adolescents like me, both in their psychological, emotional and sexual integrity.
It is crucial to relate the acts and the author.
In this case, we are talking about an author who cannot be differentiated from his work.
His writings are autobiographical, he has published his personal diary for 40 years, he is not a fictional character.
It is no longer about morality but about breaking the law.
There are laws that protect minors and no one can override them under literary pretext. Matzneff was also the author of that open letter calling for the decriminalization of pedophilia in 1977 and which was published in Le Monde and Libération.
How do you explain that almost 70 intellectuals from libertarian France, such as Simone de Beauvoir, signed it? That is the word: libertarian.
At that time freedom was carried as far as possible, whether it was in the customs or the sexual.
There is also a confusion between pedophilia and homosexuality.
Intellectuals like Roland Barthes put pedophilia on the same level as homosexuality, as if it were a sexual orientation.
I have wondered a lot about the blindness of all these intellectuals, especially feminists like Beauvoir.
They fought so that young women could have the right to their sexuality and they signed that open letter believing that they were defending them.
They did not understand that they were signing a letter in favor of pedophilia.
In the book, he explains intimate moments of great rawness.
Was it hard to relive certain episodes, like the first time at Matzneff's house?
It was the hardest part.
I wanted to tell the facts in the most objective, most clinical way, that it was a factual account so that the reader could draw his conclusions.
I did not want to go to pathos or victimhood and even less to incite the reader to voyeurism.
After her book, Francesca Gee broke her silence and told a story very similar to her own.
Like me, she fell in love with this man.
And her love served as an excuse for many pedophile writings: we no longer speak of adolescents but of children.
I discovered that Francesca had written a book that told a story very similar to mine but had not found anyone to publish it.
I was shocked, I understood that the French edition had made a barrier: for years it had protected Matzneff by not publishing these testimonies.
I mean journalists, editors ... Without the #MeToo wave, could I have published the book? I started writing it before the Weinstein issue.
In France we already had the Strauss-Kahn case.
There was a germ in French society, which no longer accepted intolerable behavior from the men in power.
Last November, actress Adèle Haenel recounted that she had suffered sexual harassment by a director [Christophe Ruggia] when she was 12 years old and how the experience traumatized her.
All this context has been favorable to the release of the book.
But what these coincidences show is that something is happening, that there is a revolution in the world and it is necessary to listen.
Men do not have to see it as a threat but as a way to reinvent masculinity.
When so many testimonies accumulate ... society is still sick in the 21st century. Adèle Haenel left the Caesar gala shouting "Shame!"
when Polanski was announced as best director.
In her book, Matzneff defends her against "American Puritanism."
Returning to Haenel, is the Polanski case a shame for France? I will be more restrained to distinguish the Polanski case from that of Matzneff.
Here it is possible to separate the work of man: in her films she does not make an apology for rape.
But if he is guilty of the events reported by several women, he must be held accountable, it is not normal for him to have escaped justice.
I don't know if Polanski raped those women, but he has admitted that he had sex with a minor in the United States.
An adult man has to know how to restrain his drives.
It is normal to feel desire for a young and beautiful girl but an adult must be able to forbid that desire and not act.
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