I decided to read Jacqueline Harpman's novel "I Who Have Never Known Men" -- the new English translation by Ros Schwartz that's currently making a splash in the US, which I loved and highly recommend you read -- after reading Davey Davis's post about it. I had seen physical copies in bookstores and been vaguely put off, judging it superficially by its title and its cover, imagining that it was a newly written book and that it would be mostly about the author's beliefs about the essential, biologically innate natures of men and women. Maybe the heroine would take the British position and would lament how penises make people evil and there's just no way to change that and isn't it nice to at least have the consolation of knowing your own genitals make you virtuous -- even worse, she might end up getting married. I am very glad that this is not that book, although Harpman may probably have thought men and women have complementary, biologically essential natures, and she did get married; she just managed to write an excellent book anyways.
There's another book I loved that this one reminded me of, that I'd recommend to anyone who found "I Who Have Never Known Men" compelling: "The Wall" by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer. In "The Wall," the protagonist goes with her husband to stay with friends at a remote mountain cottage. When she wakes up, the friends and her partner are gone and she is alone; they've left a note saying they'll be right back, but they don't return, and when she goes after them she discovers that the world beyond a certain point from the cottage is in suspension behind a transparent wall, as though glass filled the rest of the world and left her in a bubble. In isolation, she cohabits with a handful of farm animals and engages in the struggle to survive without other people, haunted by memories of her life and her daughter; the novel is concerned with the reproductive labor of the family, and as I recall from the preface Haushofer said it was partially an exploration of a fantasy about not having been a mother, and what it might have been like to have a lifetime to savor solitude for its own sake. In that way, I think its primary concerns may be closer to what audiences thought they were getting into if, like me, they went into "I Who Have Never Known Men" expecting it to be primarily about a recognizable historical nuclear family.
Although it's a fundamentally surreal and poetic novel, the segregation of genders in "I Who Have Never Known Men" is directly realistic to how gender is done in modern highly technologized nations where we carry passports with gender markers: this form of gender is a prison, enforced artificially and violently, creating an absurd situation for the people subjected to it. Initially the 39 adults with whom the narrator shares the prison of her childhood appear to be imprisoned in this cell entirely because they are women, and the fact that the uniformed prison guards pacing back and forth above them with whips are all men suggests that their imprisonment is part of some kind of genocide against women perpetrated by men. Until their escape, they have no way of knowing that although all prison guards are men, some prisons are men's prisons -- and they don't find this out until an incomprehensible calamity apparently kills all other people that the narrator could have ever met beside her fellow inmates.
The absence of rape in this prison is notable. 40 women live in absolute captivity at the hands of male guards, but any sexual exploitation would be evident due to the lack of privacy, and none is evident. They don't experience any degradation more intimate than collective denial of privacy and autonomy. This does not reflect the reality of prisons - I imagine that just wasn't the main thing for this specific book for Harpman, but it's not a distraction from her point, either. The 40 people in each of all this world's prisons have a sex category inscribed on them, men and women alike, by a hostile force, rendering their lives incomplete and miserable. I am reminded of homophobes and transphobes who expect the existence of sexual violence in prisons to shame and control queer and trans people both inside and outside prisons, imagining that that system of violence exists to protect virtuous bystanders and allow them to delight in vicarious atrocity. Even if the reader finds themself suffering from cisness, perhaps they can consider this an invitation to have a sexual way of being that expresses openness, mutuality and joy, instead of forcibly imposed categorization. Our sexualities do not fit into prisons because prisons are anti-human and we are human.
When the phrase "I who have never known men" first appears in the text, the narrator, now an endling of the human species, alone in a world of emptiness, is staring at a man's corpse, imagining that he could have been her father or her lover -- a member of her human community. She imagines from what remains of his face that he was handsome, and she interprets the position of his corpse, sitting upright propped between folded mattresses, as proof that he confronted the absurdity of his situation with courage and dignity. (Of course, many people die with courage and dignity lying out in the open, such as Alex Pretti, for example.)
>> "I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious. [...] I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence."
I think there is tremendous optimism about humanity, and about men in particular, in the choice to say that the narrator has "never known men." Although the prisoners suspect the prison guards appear like human men but are really aliens, or perhaps are human men controlled or just employed by aliens, she could have said that she "knew" the pacing prison guards. Their faces and bodies were visible and recognizable from inside the prison; the routine they created, with shift changes apparently marking arbitrary increments of time, contained predictable events, and the rules they enforced were evident to the prisoners. But this is not enough to constitute knowledge of a man or of men in general. In fact, it's impossible to imagine that the bodies of the men who enforced this brutal regime gave evidence of any real or adequate self-knowledge, either - if they have free will, their use of it for carceral ends is a negation of their selves. The violators erase themselves, and their lives are lost. And the humanity of the imprisoned dead men must be honored with grief for the lost potential, the knowledge that cannot be had. To say that there is a potential for men to live differently, not as violators or as victims, is a profound feminist statement and affirmation of human dignity.
Harpman draws our attention to the importance of this kind of "knowing" in the first couple pages, with the narrator speculating that in humanity's pre-carceral past, it "must have been easy" to do things like learn new languages or skills, since people had so much freedom. She slyly suggests that you, the reader, should be grateful for the chance to live a life of the mind, should be curious and open to experience, and should value your connections with other people.
The climax of the novel is the last scene in which the narrator's gaze rests upon the face of another living person, a monumentally described scene in which the second-to-last person is said to give up thought and subjectivity. A woman older than the narrator who may be experiencing cognitive decline (inseparable from her existential grief), this second-to-last person beholds the final other, a person from her cohort of prisoners that she didn't know very well and is a bit annoyed by feeling beholden to just because they happen to be the last two people alive -- a relationship that reminds me of many acquaintances and strangers in my real life passing through U.S. cities, such as the impoverished and socially isolated exes and harassers of my friends, coworkers who were afraid to join the union, panhandlers who sexually harassed me while I gave them money. We are working class queer people and we need to love and be loved more than they say we deserve to survive capitalism. The two characters go through the motions of mutual responsibility to the end, and watch hope die in each other; without a future or a collectivity it's not enough to sustain life's meaning, and the older woman dies in and of despair.
>> "I didn't watch the sky. I was fascinated by Laura. She seemed to be disappearing inside herself, withdrawing further and further. ... Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense ... I sat looking at her for a long time, then I lay her on the bench and crossed her hands on her chest, carefully placing her palms downwards. ... The grave was ready in an hour."
The narrator is now free to walk across the deserted world of prisons alone, not burdened by the obligations of care for others, and as she remarked (joked?) to another woman before that woman's death, she's now the "sole proprietor" of the whole world. I would say this is Harpman asking us to consider whether disavowing our obligations to others and hoarding possessions to ourselves gives meaning to life. The exhilaration of walking away from this final grief does give the narrator happiness, and towards the end of the book, she finds a paradisiacal bunker outfitted with a luxurious bed "big enough for many people," a microwave, a comprehensive collection of literary classics, a scientific text on "astronautics" that she can't understand, even more vast quantities of frozen food. It's the first human living space she's known, and she must live there not merely alone, but with only the barest, insistent glimmer of uncertainty in her total isolation, the faintest idea of possibility that if everyone can disappear and die for no reason, perhaps someone will appear for no reason. This palace from which she writes, thinks about her life, and plans to die, is essentially the same as all the prisons she's known except for her freedom of the mind and her freedom to plan a death she finds dignified.
Harpman's family fled Belgium and lived in exile in Morocco during its Nazi occupation, and she lost many family members in Auschwitz. The people who were missing from her life when she wrote "Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes" in the 1990s are still missing, and we do not know what they would have said and did if they had lived, or how their children who never lived would have remembered them. We are all obliged to ask ourselves, now, what we can do to save each other from the ethnic cleansing of the U.S. and the omnicide of climate change, what we can do to live with dignity and reshape the world into anything but another prison.
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