Facing the Silence of the World: I Who Have Never Known Men

In a barren landscape stripped of meaning, Harpman presents an absurd thought-experiment shaped by the female consciousness.

I Who Have Never Known Men 2019 book cover. Source: Transit Books, https://www.transitbooks.org/books/iwhohaveneverknownmen

The feeling of absurdity strikes when the human desire for patterns is met with the world’s irrationality. Facing a reality that refuses to give answers, offering only surreal proceedings of incomprehensible nothingness, strangeness becomes visceral and psychological. Albert Camus once described the world’s refusal to give answers as the “unreasonable silence of the world.” This absurd silence is deafening to the protagonist of Jacqline Harpman’s 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men.

Born in the outside world and held captive in a bunker along with thirty-nine adult women, the young protagonist – the child – of Harpman’s novel, knows little about the “normal” way of living. In contrast to the women who previously had full lives outside the bunker, the rules of the bunker are the rules of the young girl’s life. The loud whip that echoes when the women touch is her reality. The bars of the cage defines the boundaries of her existence. Though captive, the women are closely watched and responsively provided for. Food is delivered for the women to cook; occasional fabrics are brought for them to make clothes; lights are turned out for them to sleep. The women are not allowed to talk to the male guards outside their cage. Or at least, the guards never speak to the women or to each other. If a woman is to attempt suicide inside the cage, the whip would strike again to interdict the action of harm. The sound would echo, accompanying the otherwise-silence of the guards.

Stories of the outside world become a source of captivation and bewilderment for the child. While the older women approach their memories with nostalgia, sentimentality, longing, and a helpless sense of sadness, the child approaches them with curiosity, occasionally puzzled by the women’s despair and hopelessness. But the child learns from the stories anyway. Slowly prying open the “secrets” of the adults, the child learns the concepts of letters and writing; she learns that the heart beats at a steady rate; she learns that if she focuses on counting her own heartbeat, she can keep time and become a human clock. With this newfound bodily technology, the child and the women discover that there is, in fact, no concrete schedule governing the guards’ behavior at all. 

Amidst the women’s struggle to make sense of it all, one day a siren sounds as the guards open the cage’s gate to provide food. Hearing the piercing siren, the guards retreat quickly, leaving only the women and the open hatch. As the initial shock settles, for the first time since their capture, the forty women exit the cage and ascend the stairs to the outside world. While many women fear the return of the guards, the child sees the world beyond as already hers, as she reflects, “I was less surprised than the others, who had lived in a world where things used to make sense. But I had only known the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them, as I began to realize. We were free.”

Yet, just as the inside never gave them answers, the outside never plans to grant any either. While the guards never return, the vast, open, and barren landscape continues to lead the child into a surreal journey of marked by an absurd silence.

In the novel, Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman’s training in psychoanalysis becomes subtly apparent. Harpman’s rich and probing investigation of the protagonist’s thinking, feeling, and psychological evolution reveals the complexity of the absurd world she lives in. Observing such absurdity, Harpman’s lens, as always, is specifically female. With an open hand, Harpman allows her female protagonist and the other characters to exist in the landscape without forcing a designated plot line or consequences. Harpman’s characters traverse the freedom, restraints, and nonsensical conditions of the bunker and the world with full agency, within the limits and autonomy of their female bodies. These female characters, in a way, are more experiments than figures for the readers to extract meaning from. The book never seeks a resolution of the absurd, nor attempts to reach one. The readers stay in the disorientation of the absurd, clear-headedly, with the ever-contemplative guidance of the protagonist.

In keeping with Camus’ idea of the absurd as the world’s silence, the first English translation of the book by Ros Schwartz in 1997 was titled The Mistress of Silence. In Schwartz’s revisited translation of 2019, the title stays more faithful to the original French: I Who Have Never Known Men (Moi, Qui N’ai Pas Connu Les Hommes). In this new title, though losing the satisfying philosophical association, the stake of femaleness – a concept that is central to Harpman’s writing – is emphatically articulated.

Strange, surreal, sci-fi redefined, I Who Have Never Known Men leaves readers in an otherworldly place, filled with a feeling of the absurd, without any answers. The story Harpman presents here is not an allegory, not a metaphor, but a simple thought experiment – an experiment into what would happen to the human and female experience if one were placed in a world without meaning. The presentation of a story, not as a message but as a thought experiment, is precisely the quality that sets Harpman’s novel apart. Instead of offering insights directly onto its reader, the book invites us to experience the world’s strangeness by leading us through the psyche of a person who has lived only in that world – a woman who happens to have grown up in a bunker, a woman who has never known men.