what does it mean to be human?
post-apocalypse post-gender post-fiction
If you have not yet read I Who Have Never Known Men please take literally 48 hours to read the book before continuing to read this post. I’m serious, it’s only 188 pages, it won’t take long, you won’t regret any time or money spent. I’ll wait…
I Who Have Never Known Men, written by Jacqueline Harpman, was originally published in French in 1995. And, as you know, because you have read the book and you are not spoiling this amazing experience for yourself, this little novel attempts to answer quite an uncatchable question: what does it mean to be human?
Is our narrator really a human if she’s the only living Homo sapien on a planet that might not be Earth, with no one left to talk to?
The novel, the artistry of Harpman’s writing, wanders around this question; much like the women take to wandering around the country once free of the cage. ‘We can’t settle here and live from the bunker like parasites. We must remain human beings. I want to know where we are, who imprisoned us and why.’
I agree with Harpman and the character who said this. Curiosity makes us human. Whether or not that curiosity is ever satisfied, and maybe even because we can feel and name the frustration of unanswered curiosity. By the end of the book none of those questions are answered.
Our narrator is obsessed with finding out. I don’t think I’ve identified with a idea any more than this: ‘That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.’
Unfortunately the women she’s caged with seem to hoard their knowledge as if that gives them some semblance of power and control over someone else — a desperate allegiance to the old hierarchy of our society. She finally gets one of the women to engage in meaningful conversation by suggesting, ‘…I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’
Again I agree, having the language to talk about abstractions like thoughts and opinions, and sparking new ideas off another person is what makes us human.1
It seems the one question that both the narrator and myself are oddly unbothered by is whether or not the women and the bunkers and the cages are on Earth. She does not think it matters, I also do not think it matters, and I am reasonably certain that Harpman doesn’t think that living on planet Earth is a crucial component of being human. She follows our narrator and the women as they transform from prisoners, to nomads, to the small settlements they build. When she is finally left alone, when the last woman dies, our narrator goes back to wandering the land. Like a curious human.
In the past, one of the women said to her, ‘You are the only one of use who belongs to this country.’
And she replied, ’No, this country belongs to me.’
Normally I would be bothered by someone claiming a new land for themselves, but in this instance I support our narrator fully. I love that she is so full of agency, so full of confidence.
The fact that she is a woman feeling these kind of feelings means we need to address, finally and grudgingly, the fact that our narrator has never known men. She has never had a man tell her that he owns both the country and her body. She has also never flirted, never made out with a boy, never had sex with a man. If Harpman meant for this to signify something about our narrator’s humanity perhaps the years since 1995 have scrambled the message for me.
Our narrator may not have known men personally, but when she finally finds a bunker with actual human items inside she reads stories about men, written by men. In the opening of the book she prefaces her story with this comparison: ‘After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.’
It isn’t until the end of the book that we learn that while she might have read Shakespeare she was unfortunately lacking the context of humanity’s cultural history to understand what she read.
‘Do I understand Shakespeare’s plays, or the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, or what is going on in Dostoevsky’s novels? I think not.’
In my estimation this is the only area in which our narrator deviates slightly from being human. Our capacity for creating and interpreting art — for sparking new ideas off of other people and their work — is what sets us apart from other highly intelligent species on this planet, and it is my favourite part of being a human.
I say she only slightly deviates because in the suspended disbelief of this novel, she (a woman) has written her memoir (about herself and other women) and somehow we are reading it. She has done that human thing that I long to do: contribute meaningfully to human culture.
Please tell me that you read the book before reading this post. This book struck my core. It took me months and months, and thousands of deleted words, to get this out. Thank you for reading :)
fuck AI