I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman
(translated by Ros Schwartz)
A book review
I was forced to acknowledge too late, much
too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was
human after all…
Belgian
psychoanalyst and author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) wrote over fifteen
novels and won several literary prizes.
I confess with some shame that I had never heard of her. Perhaps I might be forgiven considering the
dearth of English translations of her works.
In fact, Harpman’s 1995 novel Moi Qui
N’ai Pas Connu les Hommes was the first to be translated into English
(originally with the title Mistress of
Silence) and, although I stand to be corrected, I believe that of her other
novels, only the Prix Medicis prize-winner Orlanda
is also available in English.
Mistress of Silence is
being reissued by Vintage Books with the title I
Who Have Never Known Men, in the translation by Ros Schwartz, a veteran
translator from the French who was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres in 2009. The novel’s premise is simple: in an undefined
period in the near future, we meet forty women who are kept prisoners in a cage
in an underground bunker, guarded by a group of armed men, and supplied with
just the basic necessities of modern life – electricity, food, water and
medication. Eventually, the women manage
to escape, only to find themselves roaming what seems to be an uninhabited,
post-apocalyptic alien world. The older
women hazily but fondly recall a different “normality”, one in which they went
around the daily business of life – working, falling in love, raising families. The unnamed narrator is a teenager who has
only known life in the bunker. She has
no other recollections and is aware that she will never share the experiences
which the other women wax nostalgic about. She tries
to learn about the past, only to realise that it will serve her no purpose in
this strange environment where she will “never know men”.
This
new edition of the novel is very clearly meant to capitalise on the current
interest in feminist dystopian fiction and it is surely no coincidence that it
features a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure. Female prisoners guarded by men, escaping
to form a utopia in which they manage to survive without the opposite sex… it certainly
is a plot which invites a feminist reading.
Yet, as Mackintosh perceptively notes, the novel “is not necessarily
extolling this kind of existence” and might even be suggesting that “this
settling is the downfall of the women”.
Perhaps it’s fairer to say that rather than seeking to ponder “what it
means to be a woman” or, for that matter, “a man”, Harpman is more interested
to explore what it is that makes us “human”.
The older women have memories of
life on Earth to remind them of their humanity – the narrator is, on the other
hand, a blank slate, with no preconceived ‘social constructs’ apart from what
she has vaguely gleaned from her fellow prisoners. She has to discover anew the meaning of an
existence to which there appears to be no mapped-out purpose.
This novel
raises striking philosophical concepts and provides much food for thought. Depending on the reader’s tastes, this could
also be its weakness. In fact, this is,
in my view, an example of a “novel as thought experiment”. We are given just enough narrative on which
to append philosophical discourse. Interesting as that is, anyone looking for page-turning
thrills will likely be disappointed. On my part, I felt short-changed by the
lack of cogent explanations behind several basic elements of the plot. I like some ambiguity in a plot, but this
novel possibly leaves too much to one’s imagination.
Yet, there’s
no escaping the effectiveness of the novel’s bleak imagery, and I have this suspicion
that it will remain with me for a long time.
Paperback, 208 pages
Expected publication: May 2nd 2019 by Vintage (first published 1995)
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