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

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

by Rich Horton

Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) was a Belgian novelist, filmmaker, and psychoanalyst; a woman of many parts who was also fascinated by physics and astronomy. She was of Jewish heritage, and her family spent the war years in Casablanca to escape the Nazis. (Several relatives were killed in the Holocaust.) Her first husband was a film director and she collaborated on several of his films, and turned to writing and then to psychiatry. She published a couple of dozen books, with considerable success. I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) was the first of her books to be translated into English, in 1997 as Mistress of Silence; and several further novels have been translated since then. Mistress of Silence was reissued in 2022 as I Who Have Never Known Men, a more direct translation of the French title (Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes) and also a direct quote from the novel. It gained considerable popularity at the time. The translator is Ros Schwartz. I listened to the audiobook, read very well by Nikki Massoud.

The unnamed (even to herself) narrator opens by telling us that she is alone as she writes this account, and will likely die soon. And then she tells of her life. Her first memories are of life in an underground cage. She is the only child in a group of 40 women, who are kept prisoner by a group of men, guards. They never leave the cage, and the men never enter the cage. They are kept in order by whips, though by the time of the story, the women never seem to be hit -- the snap of the whip near them is enough. They are not allowed to touch each other, and they have no books, no paper, no clock. The single toilet is out in the open.

This goes on for years, until the narrator, called the "child" by the other women, is about 15. She is pubescent, and has what seem to be sexual fantasies, but is not wholly developed sexually. She has passed from a feeling of anger with the other women to some accommodation -- after years of refusing to tell her anything, they begin to tell her what they know of their situation, and what they remember of their past life -- very little in either case. The narrator learns simple math, learns to count time, and becomes friends with a 40ish woman named Anthea. 

Then, one day as food is passed into their cage, there is an alarm, and the guards suddenly flee, leaving the keys in the lock -- and so the women escape. They head upstairs and go outside, and find themselves on a large and almost featureless plain. There is lots of food stored in their prison, and some equipment. They set up a camp outside, and then, led by the narrator, begin exploring. In time they discover additional prisons, in which they inevitably find 40 dead people -- sometimes all women, sometimes all men. They make themselves homes. And, of course, the women begin to die, of old age, illness, and suicide. Meanwhile the narrator is ever learning, learning eventually to read and write, and after everyone else has died, making a couple more significant discoveries.

But still, never an understanding of what disaster led to their imprisonment (and that of so many more.) Nor do they even know where they are -- this planet can hardly be Earth. In this way this novel -- rightly acknowledged as a work of science fiction -- radically differs from most genre SF, for there is no explanation, no understanding. What is it about, then? It is most definitely NOT, unlike what some remarkably obtuse critics have suggested, anything at all like The Handmaid's Tale. And while in many ways it describes a terrible, and very sad, situation, it is oddly not bleak in tone. This is largely a function of the narrator's voice, and of her innocence, resulting in her knowing nothing of the Earth where she was born. But nor is it at all triumphalist. The narrator knows that her life in the end means nothing, solves nothing. She appears to -- to the extent possible -- live a good life, if a lonely life; but she certainly mourns what she missed. The story does have something to say about organizing a life, a small society, in a nearly hopeless situation. It does have something to say about life without men -- but remember that the men imprisoned here had a life without women. It's a strange and mysterious book -- more involving than I expected on first encountering it. I don't think it's as good as its reputation suggests -- perhaps I am so much a genre reader that I really do miss some explanation -- but it's worth reading.