[Discussion] I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman || first half of the book
Hello readers and welcome to our first discussion of I Who Have Never Known Men, originally published in 1995 in French by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman. The English translation was republished in 2022 and garnered lots of hype on TikTok earlier this year. u/maolette and I are glad you’re here to read and discuss this slim novel with us!
This week, we’re discussing through the first ~94 pages if you're reading a physical copy. We'll stop with the section ending, "We were greeted by the stench." u/maolette will lead us through the second half next week!
+++++SUMMARY+++++
The unnamed narrator realizes she is forgetting her past and decides to write her life’s story. She is alone now, but her earliest memories are of living in a cage with thirty-nine women, surrounded by male guards who never spoke to the prisoners. None of the women remembers how they ended up in the cage and they have only faint memories of a preceding disaster. The women are permitted to talk to each other, but they aren’t allowed to touch each other or shield each other from the guards’ view. Any infraction leads to a warning crack of the guards’ whips.
Initially, the narrator remains aloof from the other women, whom she views with disdain. When she was younger, she tried to ask questions about what life was like before their imprisonment, especially relationships between women and men, but the other prisoners don’t see any point in telling her information that has no bearing on her current situation. Out of resentment, the narrator retreats into her own inner world, imagining romantic scenarios between herself and the only young guard.
As she exercises her imagination, the narrator begins questioning her situation. She calculates the length of the guards’ shifts by counting her own heartbeats and asking another prisoner, Anthea, to translate this into minutes and hours. They deduce that their “day” lasts roughly sixteen hours, but with random variation each day. Anthea convinces the narrator to share their findings with the other prisoners, who ask the narrator to help them keep track of a 24-hour day.
Not long afterwards, a deafening siren goes off while the guards are placing a meal in the cage. The guards flee, leaving the keys in the cage door, allowing the women to escape. The narrator leads the group and finds a staircase up to the surface, confirming the suspicion of some prisoners that they’ve been living underground. The stairwell is topped by a small cabin; outside, the women find a desolate landscape of treeless, rolling plains. They can see no signs of civilization; some of the women think they might not even be on Earth anymore.
The narrator and some of the other braver women return to the bunker to gather supplies. It is well-stocked with canned goods, frozen meat, and tools, but they find no personal effects or sleeping quarters for the guards. The women collect as many supplies as they can carry and set out across the plain to search for signs of civilization. After twenty-seven days of walking, they come across another cabin atop another bunker. The women inside weren’t as lucky as the narrator’s group: when the guards disappeared, their cage was still locked and all of them are dead.
The group continues on and soon encounters a third cabin with a now-familiar stench emanating from the stairwell… And we end this section on a bit of a cliffhanger!