“I Who Have Never Known Men”

Existentialist literature pares down human experience to its barest existence. In my opinion, that’s exactly the effect of this novel — I Who Have Never Known Men —by author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012). The stark reality of a world in which only one human being remains alive and conscious is the focus of this rather short novel. The character (never named) grapples with fundamental questions that in fact don’t bother most of us who lead an ordinary social existence. She says: “I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.” (p. 5)

I admired this novel for the economy with which the author uses words and formulates ideas, getting to questions of existence without being too pretentious. I admired the way a very bleak and unfriendly landscape became a key part of the narrator’s seeking in an absurd world. It makes me think of the classic example of existential fiction, the novel Woman in the Dunes by Japanese author Kobo Abe and the French film based on it.

The existentialists had an acute sense of the absurd, and the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men puts it thus: “Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.” (p. 55)

And near the end of the book she wonders: “What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive? (p. 159) This is a powerful book, though I think it implicitly claims to be deep and profound to a greater extent than maybe it actually accomplishes. The AI summary from google says: “The book is a modern classic of feminist speculative fiction, known for its haunting atmosphere and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. ”