When I first read Le Consentement, some time before the opportunity to translate it came my way, I shivered at the portrayal of the claustrophobic world of St. Germain des Prés that Vanessa Springora conjures with such deft precision. It’s a tiny area of Paris, but the power it exerts as the nexus of generations of literary dreams and fantasies remains strong in the minds of Parisians and visitors alike. Springora was born into this quasi-aristocratic world and knows it intimately. Her ability to evoke its intricate social codes and superficial glamour, the painfully gendered hierarchies of social, literary, and political entitlement, infuses the book with nervy, mercurial intensity.
The challenge for the translator is to navigate the multiple registers of the prose, to match the nimble, suggestive descriptions of social occasions and interpersonal dramas, so brilliantly summoned in French, sometimes in barely more than a single word or phrase. Most important of all, the translator must summon with the same nuance the double vision that characterizes the narrative: the child’s view of the world as it segues into that of the adult looking back. Springora’s taut fury as she recounts her experiences of her abuse and subsequent breakdown is modified by her benevolent pity for her younger self, a “broken toy” who has had to struggle so hard to learn to trust and love again.
Consent is a memoir of abuse, but it is also a penetrating exploration of both language and literature—specifically French—as a vector of power. Springora’s abuser, “G.M.,” a self-styled “great writer,” is horrified at the thought of anyone abusing his beloved French, while unashamedly indulging in the grotesque sexual and emotional abuse of children. He lays romantic store in the notion that his elegant way with prose will save him, not from himself, or the wrath of God, but from the grimly bourgeois straitjacket of conventional morality, and, more prosaically, from jail. Springora wonders, as many others have, why such behavior is tolerated “when it is perpetrated by a representative of the artistic elite—a photographer, writer, filmmaker, or painter. It seems that an artist is of a separate caste, a being with superior virtues granted the ultimate authorization, in return for which he is required only to create an original and subversive piece of work. A sort of aristocrat in possession of exceptional privileges before whom we, in a state of blind stupefaction, suspend all judgment.”
Even at the age of fourteen, Springora instinctively understands that her abuser is using language to steal her soul. One day he determines to write her assignment for school, an experience she describes as a “dispossession.” Throughout their relationship he takes endless notes in his Moleskine notebooks, and uses them later to turn her, barely disguised, into a character in several novels that are published to some acclaim by the most esteemed Parisian publishing houses. “I was just a character, living on borrowed time, like every other girl who’d come before me. It wouldn’t be long before he erased me completely from the pages of his wretched diary. For his readers, it was merely a story, words.” The money he earns from his writing finances his trips to the Philippines where he further indulges his pedophilia, tales of which then fill his published diaries. He carries a letter from President Mitterrand around with him wherever he goes, like a talisman, convinced that the president’s mellifluous praise will keep him from arrest.
It is only after several years that Springora returns, with some reluctance, to the world of publishing and literature she has turned her back on for so long. Having been tormented for years by the annual publication of a novel or collection of letters that feature her or her correspondence with G.M., having been “trapped in a deceptive likeness, a reductive version of [myself], a grotesque, contorted snapshot,” she finds herself restored, mended, able to live and love in a way that for so long she believed she would never be able to. She realizes, triumphantly, that the same language that had once exerted its insidious power over her was now to be the instrument of her salvation, enabling her not only to name and shame G.M. himself, but to extend her criticism to all those both in publishing and in the Parisian intellectual world in general who protected and supported him for so many years. If she has learned one thing from her abuser it is what every writer and translator knows: that there is no such thing as “merely a story,” or “merely words.” She finally understands that the only way to become the subject of her own story is to write it down: “Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?”
Natasha Lehrer
Paris, August 2020