An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star
Harpman’s picture of stripped-down desolation has resonated with many social-media users, who have praised the book’s “haunting” story and likened it to “staring into a void.” There’s an incongruity to the fact that an austere twentieth-century work of dystopian science fiction, which was admired when it was released for its philosophical rigor and inward focus, is finding new life on a social platform built out of clips that are disposable by design. But “I Who Have Never Known Men” has a fruitful vagueness. The narrator, purged of identifiers except for her yearning, her rational faculties, and her sense of unbelonging, is counterintuitively relatable—a portrait of rudimentary, universal humanity. (A whiff of melodrama to Harpman’s vision probably plays well online, too.)
It might also matter that “I Who Have Never Known Men” is preoccupied with many of the same questions that BookTokers, with their ephemeral medium and their new role as cultural conservators, have reason to care about. What are the creative forms that persist after you’ve disappeared? What enables an art work to transcend the stream? Harpman was writing in a different era, but the elegiac loneliness of her fiction anticipates our own solitary and screen-bound present. Is there anyone out there? her book seems to ask. How do I find you?
Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. During the Nazi occupation, she and her family fled to Morocco, where they lived until the end of the war, escaping the fate of several relatives on her father’s side, who died in Auschwitz. Back in her home country, Harpman began studying medicine, but had to stop after she contracted tuberculosis. She convalesced in a sanatorium for two years—an experience that, like the nightmare still fresh in the memory of European Jews, may have filtered into her prison plot. Her first book, “Love and Acacia,” was published in 1958, when she was nearing thirty, but she composed the majority of her fourteen novels in her fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the interim, she trained in psychology, and in 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. (Her undergraduate dissertation was on Rorschach tests.) Appreciated but not idolized in her lifetime, she won a handful of prizes, including the Prix Médicis for “Orlanda,” from 1996, about a woman whose tomboyish tendencies split off from the rest of her psyche and jump into the body of a music journalist.
Most of Harpman’s work that has so far been translated into English circles feelings of entrapment, disorientation, and exile. Psychoanalytic concepts—projection, attachment, wishes and wish fulfillment—loom large. Harpman portrays sexual fantasy, and its relation to writing, with startling frankness. Isolation becomes both an affliction and a muse in “I Who Have Never Known Men,” as the narrator spins out a sequence of erotic stories in her head. They star her youngest jailer, who, like his fellows, is forbidden to interact with his charges. (In a rare, sly note of comedy, she also stares at him incessantly, telling another woman that this is a form of resistance, and that she’s “invented something unexpected.”) Each fantasy, the girl says, produces “an extraordinary burst of light exploding inside me.” In pursuit of this “eruption,” she tells herself “increasingly long and complicated stories,” trying to outsmart her “inner audience” and retain the element of surprise. “My imagination developed,” she reports. “I had to exercise rigorous discipline.” Sometimes one part of her wants to get to the finale, but another part, “entranced by the pleasure of listening,” would prefer that the narrative keep going.
As the girl’s process evolves, the fictions themselves become at least as important as their physical effects, and a series of recurring characters turn into “old friends.” Her wistful hope is that a good enough story might yield companions so detailed and lively that they can satisfy her hunger for connection. She doesn’t realize how limited these friends are until she discovers books.
Poignantly, given that all the living men in the novel are incarcerators, the narrator directs little hostility toward traditional masculine ideals. In fact, her account often seems suffused with longing for heterosexual relationships—for the husbands and the lovers that she, unlike the elder women in the bunker, will never have. “How could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?” she asks. By this point, she no longer experiences eruptions, but she’s still conjuring up men. When death comes for her, she writes, “I will take my last ten steps to go and put these sheets of paper on the table . . . an emaciated old woman whose eyes, which no hand will close, will always be looking toward the door.”
