Book Review: I Who Have Never Known Men Jacqueline Harpman, Ros Schwartz (Translator)

 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Ros Schwartz (Translator), Sophie Mackintosh (Afterword)

 173 pages, Paperback
Published May, 2022 by Transit Books

 First published January 1, 1995

When this book showed up in my library holds, I was a bit confused. At some point, I put this book on hold, and by the time it got to me, even after I read it, I couldn't remember who suggested it. Eventually I figured out that it was Zoe from the Science Fiction Book Club on Facebook. So shout-out.

Jacqueline Harpman was a famous French Psychoanalyst. She was a Belgian Jew who fled as a child with her family when the Nazis came. She had published a few books and then decided, after doing alright as a writer, that she would become a psychoanalyst, which she was more famous for.  Most of her work is not translated, and she has made a few films with her husband, who is a director, none of which I had ever heard of. That is on me.

Much like Ice by Anna Kavan, this is a weird feminist dystopia that could easily get lost to history. Also like Ice, it seems to be avoiding that fate and becoming popular, and for good reason. 

The story is a strange one; it has more vibes than plot, but it is built off a fascinating concept. A young woman finds herself in a prison underground with a group of women.

“As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories? On the few occasions when women were willing to tell me about their past, their stories were full of events, comings and goings, men… but I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things; in other words, eating, excreting and sleeping. For a long time the days went by, each one like the day before, and then I began to think, and everything changed before nothing happened other than this repetition of identical gestures; time seemed to stand still, and even if I was vaguely aware that I was growing and time was passing my memory begins with my anger

Obviously, I have no way of knowing how old I was. The others have been adult for a long time, whereas I appear to be pre-adolescent. But my development stopped there I started to get hair under my arms and on my pubes; my breasts grew a little, and then everything came to a halt. I never have my period. The women told me I was lucky, but I wouldn't have had the bother of bleeding in the precautions to be taken as to not stain the mattress…” 

I know this is a long quote, but I think this better sets up the experience than anything I can say.  The nameless narrator expresses quite well the dehumanizing feeling of prison.  That is where it starts, but as you can see, JH is using this narrative to explore what it means to be a woman. By putting the story in this fantastical situation, the nature of the characters' humanity is constantly tested, and the novel can isolate and comment on aspects of being a woman. As a cisgender man, I thought this was a valuable experience for me to read. 

I was reading this as the Cornell rape case was starting to become a national news story, and it certainly was not lost on me that more men need this type of fictional point of view to be a part of their media diet. 

The woman at the center of this story is so divorced from women in our society that she can ask questions from a naive perspective that express POVs that men could use hearing.

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful ."

Spoken from the outside, this point of view looks as insane as it should. Beauty is not the source of our value, and it shouldn't be.

“I was the youngest, the only one who had still been a child when we were locked up. The women had always believed I ended up among them by mistake, that in the chaos I had been sent to the wrong side and no one had noticed. Once the cages were locked, they were probably never reopen. Sometimes, the women said the keys must be lost, and that even if the guards wanted to, they wouldn't be able to release us. I think it was a joke, but I had forgotten about it until now, and it was too late to check.”

The dislocation, the immersion of this mental prison, is more intense than the walls of the bunker itself. Once the women walk out, they find a world destroyed, society gone. They didn't know men, and now they never will, but much of the novel they search. As they find that while being locked away the society they were kept is gone and killed most of the planet. 

“It's odd, there aren't any birds. Do the birds shelter when it rains? Asked Greta, who had only ever lived in the city.

But where would they shelter? There isn't a single tree in sight, only a few shrubs.”

“And stones,” said Dorothy you couldn't grow anything here. I've never seen such poor soil”

The misanthrope in me loves that this novel questions all of civilization. Again their position in this underground prison gives these characters a unique position to stand outside and look back at a species  and a civilization and ponder 

“… We must look for civilization”

What civilization?”

Anthea looked at me. ¨What do you mean?¨

I shrugged.

“Just think about it. The planet belongs to them, So what would we find other than the people who held us captive? I have no wish to meet them.”

“Do you think we're on another planet?"

And I also thought that, for a second, my science fiction brain was like, wait, what?

“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”

In the end, men destroyed the surface, and despite everything, our narrator is killed by a part of her that is uniquely female. 

I Who Have Never Known Men is a radical piece of Science fiction surrealism, and it will probably just be called high literature, but no matter if she had never heard of Joanna Russ, Le Guin, or Octavia Butler, this novel is in their wake and tradition. I could see some readers being bored or feeling that it is slow to go, but I found it thought-provoking. Big Thumbs up!