I Who have Never Known Men; Book Review

Jacqueline Harpman, I Who have Never Known Men, trans. Rod Schwartz, Avon Eos, 1998, first published in French, 1998)

If anything, it heightened my respect for contemporary fiction — — I’d call it futuristic science fiction — for the power of sheer invention to frame such a probing, challenging, unforgettable meditation on gender. Harpman has created a world in which actual male human beings appear briefly, as guards, at the beginning, but die off quite early in the story, a story told by one woman about a life with other women. Men exist as memories, conjectures and, at one point, as corpses. Most of the women remember men, remember having had fathers or husbands or sons, depending on their age, before “it” happened. None of them remember “it” very clearly.  They just all woke up in some sort of underground bunker, completely separated physically and emotionally from their former lives. Their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter are met, but they’re imprisoned in an underground space. Life is communal, nothing is private. Men guard them constantly, silently, without interacting at all.

In the initial group of 40 women, the narrator is the youngest, perhaps 10 or 11 at the beginning, most of the others apparently being in their 20s and 30s. The age gap is significant enough to introduce a critical difference, or distance: the other women don’t really speak to her, at least not openly or honestly enough for her to absorb things they know and she doesn’t — not as an equal.  Eventually a few of her fellow-prisoners do become friends.  But at first, this sense of exclusion builds up to the story’s first, and for me, perhaps, the most memorable turning point. She gets angry. There are some beautifully-written passages describing the power of anger, the way it channels energy, clarifies hazy perceptions, and gradually generates an independent, particular self, an adult consciousness. The anger comes first. Then the sense of self: it, in turn, anchors the friendships.

There’s much more about survival, self-awareness, inventiveness, leaders and followers, innovations and traditions, attractions and repulsions in this very strange story. The technical, geographical, logistical underpinnings of the situation remain pure speculation, however. No one seems to even wonder what the point may be been, a feature I found perfectly plausibly, in fact quite familiar (who really asks, now, how we made the mess we’re in?).  The term “philosophical fiction” comes to mind.  It’s not usually used as a compliment, usually applied to a story thin in characterisation and event, deficient in particularity.  I found this story very rich in characterisation and events, and adept at enhancing their particularity by drawing on the reader’s own memories and convictions.  In a word, it’s a story that makes “philosophical fiction” a term of high praise.