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| Vanessa Springora’s book + Le Consentement + photographed in Paris on December 31, 2019. Photo: AFP / VNA / CVN |
She was 14, he was 49. For more than three decades, the story of this reprehensible affair, as well as all the complacency that allowed it to continue, had remained buried. She suddenly came out in this story published on January 2, 2020.
The reproach was cast on Gabriel Matzneff, Renaudot Prize 2013, deprived of his allowance from the National Book Center for low-income writers, and disowned by his publisher Gallimard, who withdrew his controversial works from sale.
Matzneff, 84, is to be tried in September for apologizing for pedophilia. He remains the target of an investigation for rapes of minors under 15.
The one Matzneff described as a sex tourist accompanying him to Manila to find young boys, Christian Giudicelli, has fared better so far. He is still a juror of Renaudot, alongside five colleagues already in place in 2013, and the books of this other writer Gallimard, aged 78, remain on sale, the last of which (“Les Spectres joyeux”, 2019) where he qualifies Matzneff as “very faithful accomplice”.
Past the scandal
Could another Matzneff be imaginable in 2021? Perhaps, even if it is not in the same form, say researchers who have been interested in the representations of sexual abuse in the literature.
“Matzneff’s uninhibited discourse on child crime is no longer possible“, according to Anne-Claire Marpeau, associate professor. However,”the questioning has subsided, past the effect of surprise and scandal. In the teaching of literature, I don’t feel that the Matzneff affair has changed much“.
Hélène Merlin-Kajman, who published in October Literature at the time of #metoo, recalls that the outcry during the publication in 2002 of a novel about a pedophile, Candy pink Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, still at Gallimard, had not led anyone to mention the Matzneff case.
But the novelist was telling more or less the same thing, in autobiographical form. “You just had to read it“, she notes.”Yes, we are witnessing a change, where public opinion fully agrees with the victim. But I have the feeling that the world of letters will move behind the world at all. It’s not great“.
“Specific to France”
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| The writer Gabriel Matzneff in Bordighera (Italy) on February 16, 2020. Photo: AFP / VNA / CVN |
Critics and the public still miss some things.
In Florent Marchet’s novel, The Living World, published in August but finished before the Matzneff affair according to the publisher Stock, the protagonist, a schoolgirl, is raped by a congener. “Without worrying about the dryness of the mucous membranes, he forces the entry of his penis“, says the narrator, before the teenager signifies her refusal of an act to which she had not consented.
This scene has gone unnoticed by literary critics. The latter only saw the rest of the novel, that of a tender entry into sexuality. For the Catholic weekly Life, the women “the description of the emerging emotions of Solène’s body“. For Le Figaro, the teenager “awaken to the sensual mysteries of life“.
One of the most prominent French novelists, Annie Ernaux, herself had long refused to qualify her first, brutal sexual relationship at 18 as rape, including when she recounted it in Girl memory in 2016. She only took this step after the Matzneff affair, for a radio documentary series broadcast by France Culture in early December.
“You’re right, now I’m right to say rape (…) I must put a word, for my contemporaries, my contemporaries of 2020. And it is that word.“she said.
AFP / VNA / CVN
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