Review: I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

In the comments on an earlier post on Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, Marie-therese and Merrian encouraged me to read I Who Have Never Known Men, and boy am I glad they did. What a terrific book.

Harpman, born in 1929, is Belgian. She’s half-Jewish, and her family fled Belgium for Casablanca during the war, but she eventually returned home. She published her first novel in 1958 after quitting medical school due to tuberculosis. She stopped writing after her fourth book was published, to return to fiction 20 years later. Harpman has been, since 1980, a psychoanalyst, and I Who Have Never Known Men, published in French in 1996 (my English translation is by Ros Schwartz, 1997), is her tenth novel. She has since written a half dozen more.

[Note: this review contains "spoilers" -- although my personal view of the novel is that that word doesn't really apply.]

As the book begins, the first person narrator grieves for a someone names Althea, whom she has lost. She tells us:

Never before had I been so devastated. I would have sworn it could not happen to me; I had seen women trembling, crying, and screaming, but I had remained unaffected by their tragedy, a witness of impulses which I found unintelligible, remaining silent even when I did what they asked of me to assist them. True, we were all caught up in the same drama that was so powerful, so all-embracing that I was unaware of anything that was not related to it, but I had come to think that I was different. And now, as I was racked with sobs, I was forced to recognize, much too late, that I too had loved, that I could suffer, and that, after all, I was human.

IWH begins at the end (“As I write these words, my tale is over.”), and offers a tantalizing view of a devastating past and a compelling present. The narrator tells us that “I never thought about the past, I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.” Harpman’s tendency to use commas where other writers would use periods, as in that last passage, enhances that feeling of “perpetual present.”

After thinking “nothing had happened to me”, she changes her mind, deciding that “if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear, or Prince Hamlet.” We learn later that the narrator’s physical journey has long since ended, but this assertion represents the culmination of the narrator’s psychological journey, which is really the more important one. Her determination to tell her story is much more than a way to pass the lonely time or a moral obligation to future generations: it constitutes her very humanity. As Salman Rushdie has put it:

We tell ourselves into being, don’t we? I think that is one of the great reasons for stories. I mean, we are the storytelling animal, there is no other creature on earth that tells itself stories in order to understand who it is. This is what we do; we’ve always done it, whether they are religious stories or personal stories, or tall stories, or lies, or useful stories, we live by telling each other and telling ourselves the stories of ourselves.

As the narrator tells her story, we realize that her existence was very unusual. She writes, “as far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories?. then, “Obviously I cannot ay how old I was.” and, “I was bad tempered all the time, but I was unaware of it, for I did not know the words for describing moods.”

We learn slowly that the narrator, as a child, was brought to an underground bunker with a group of adult women, and has lived there ever since. There are no walls, only bars, and watchful, silent male guards circle constantly. The women are not allowed to touch one another. Their toilet is in the middle of the room. As she puts it, “nobody ever escaped scrutiny.” This doesn’t bother our narrator. Indeed, she mocks the women who recall their early attempts to shield themselves form others as they relieved themselves:

the old women cursed furiously, they spoke of the indignity of being reduced to the level of animals. If the only thing that differentiates us form animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little at all, I thought.

Interestingly, there is no threat of sexual abuse, and while the guards do carry, and sometimes menacingly crack, whips, no one is physically abused. Rather, the bulk of the suffering comes from the confinement, the monotony, the mystery.

Our narrator realizes that she will never know the things the adult women know: the jobs, the families, pleasant things like kittens, going on holiday, and especially, men. In an interesting reversal, she makes an object of one of the young guards, watching him relentlessly, and developing a rich inner fantasy life about him. Her fantasies coalesce into detailed romantic narratives, as sexual as she can manage given her ignorance of men and of sex, bringing her “an eruption so overwhelming, and extraordinary burst of light.” This becomes her “secret”, something the other women demand to know. Their humanity has become so altered in confinement that the concept of a hidden inner life is as foreign as that of hiding something physical.

So, in some ways, IWH is a coming of age story, but this narrator, who has only known captivity, comes of age in a way that puts her powerfully at odds with the other women, giving her both weaknesses and strengths.

The book rapidly changes course when a loud alarm sounds and the guards, who had been in the process or giving the women their daily food rations, disappear. It is the narrator alone who is not stunned into submission by the noise and the disconcerting feeling of not being watched. She has the presence of mind to grab the key and unlock the door. They escape.

Unfortunately for the SFF reader who is hoping for some answers, none are forthcoming. The landscape is just as foreign as the bunker was. The women have no idea how they got there or where they are. And they have no idea where to go. Thus begins a long journey, which is, in its way, as monotonous and devoid of meaning as was existence in the bunker. It’s the journey, not the imprisonment, that is the hardest to take, psychologically, for the reader.

If this novel were written by an existential philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps there would be an overt lesson about creating one’s own meaning. Certainly, when the narrator decides to take time back — a true revolt, as the guards manipulated schedules to confuse the women — by counting her own heartbeats, Heidegger’s meditations of being and time become more than salient:

The key to Heidegger’s understanding of time is that it is neither simply reducible to the vulgar experience of time, nor does it originate in distinction from eternity. Time should be grasped in and of itself as the unity of the three dimensions – what Heidegger calls “ecstases” – of future, past and present. This is what he calls “primordial” or “original” time and he insists that it is finite. It comes to an end in death.

Certainly there is some of the existential exhortation to create one’s own meaning in the narrator’s assumption of leadership of the group, their making a home for themselves, and her final determination to tell her story. But all of the psychological triumphs happen against such a bleak narrative — no answers, no hope, the members of the group dying one by one — that it’s hard to feel a sense of triumph. There’s just endurance.

This book never felt like a slog, though. I found it difficult to put down. Yes, part of that was wanting to know what would happen to the narrator, why the women were confined, where everyone else went, all the usual dystopian fiction questions. (And if you need answers, this book is not for you. In fact, if you really need answers, this will almost certainly be a wallbanger.) But the real intrigue was the psychology of the characters, the way the narrator grew and changed, how an all-woman community organizes itself and negotiates life without men.

I loved the writing, but — and this is always the hardest part for me in a book review — it is hard to say how. It is very practical and realistic, while somehow evoking more. Here’s one example:

One morning, as I was returning from the village laden with cans of food, I was struck by her absent air. It was the season when it rains the least, I had put the bench outside the door, and I found her sitting there, staring into space. For years, her eyesight had been poor: now, she was gazing into the distance without even screwing up her eyes, although she said this helped her distinguish things. Her hands were resting on her thighs, but upside down, with her palms upturned, as if she had forgotten to turn them over, which made her look strange, neglected, a woman thrown there whom nobody had taken the trouble to tidy up, like a garment dropped in a hurry lying crumpled on the floor.

As you can guess from the passage, the narrator’s youth relative to the age of the other women becomes an important feature of her existence, and of the plot.

Although I disagree with other reviewers who wanted more closure at the end (I think the feeling of being unfinished is central to the themes of the novel), I do think some things were picked up and put down in a more haphazard way than I might have liked. The early emphasis on sex and men, for example, disappears, never to return. And what the women remember about their pre-captivity lives seemed a little artificially constrained by authorial intrusion. But overall, I loved this book, and I know I will return to it again and again.

Related posts:

1. Review: Possessing Morgan, by Bonnie Edwards
2. Review: Beyond His Control, by Stephanie Tyler
3. Review: The Unsung Hero, Suzanne Brockmann
4. Review: The Ex Factor, by Nancy Warren