The Post-Apocalyptic Catharsis of Jacqueline Harpman’s ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’
The state of not knowing is one of eternal limbo. To be born into a world beyond human understanding, caught delicately between a question and its answer, is to experience another reality entirely. This is the realm in which Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 novel ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ submerges itself. A text that largely revolves around the narrator’s inner musings, Harpman’s narrative (translated from French by Ros Schwartz) is quietly philosophical, revolutionary, and gut-wrenchingly good. Although the alien planet being depicted is completely distanced from our own, the tender care and humanity displayed by its inhabitants is comforting and tragic all at once – the beauty of human connection is preserved.
Thirty-nine women and one teenage girl, our narrator, are imprisoned in an underground cage patrolled by guards; their existence monotonous, with no privacy and no physical contact. None of them can remember why they were forcibly captured and locked away. The insular narrator is the youngest and thus, has no memories of the outside world, constantly conjuring up fantasies from a society destroyed – imagining what it would be like to love, and be loved. From the very first pages, she struggles against the futility of her existence: ‘alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror’. Unlike the other women who suffer alongside her, she has no memories of her past life, no hope to cling to, no default to long for. It is the deprivation of touch that feels particularly crucial, and out of place, removing the most basic expression of emotion.
Despite the cruel constitution of this subterranean prison, it is impossible to entirely succumb to the tedium, strategising and scheming, with the narrator learning how to measure time with her own heartbeat. Anthea, who becomes a secondary mother, voices that this is the human spirit – “when you’re human, you can’t help it”. Her unconventional mode of time becomes liberating, allowing the tiniest of freedoms by determining order to their empty days. When their liberty is suddenly, magically gained, the women still fear the male guards and their whips, as well as the vast expanse of the outside. They do not appear to be on Earth, seeing no recognisable constellations in the sky. While their physical imprisonment is no more, their mental and emotional states are still held in captivity: Annabel’s simple plea ‘“I’m frightened”’ is both childlike and forlorn. The empty land that swallows them up is perhaps just as unknowable and threatening as the cage they once inhabited – no definitive theory can explain why they have lost everything.
The fact that the narrator has never known men sets her apart, failing to understand the womens’ romantic relationships and desire for touch. She has never gone through puberty, and contemplates her asexuality; by some unknown force, she has been prevented from maturation. One of her great sources of frustration as a teenager is her lack of sexual knowledge, which the other women refuse to give her. This is another way in which she is restrained. Her imagination is futile, restricted, her body ‘cloaked in silence’. The mystery of this universe expands and infiltrates everything, including her biology. She spends her time building alone, focussing on the utilitarian details of the village that houses them. As the women share stories from their previous existences, they relate that they were “all so ordinary, the same as everybody else’’. However, to the narrator, who has no sense of ‘ordinary’, every past life is a faraway fantasy, an alien concept she can never experience.
Harpman’s exploration of death is what cemented this novel as one of my all-time favourites. The tragedy of its arrival lies not in the experience of the passing itself, but in its peacefulness, and in the slow acceptance of the sum of their lives. ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ is not wholly a depressing text, but it is deeply philosophical, and answers cannot be sought by its readers, or the caged women it depicts. This is all they will ever know, and feel, lost in ‘a world of absurdity’.
Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor
