A mostly bleak but sometimes hopeful microcosm for the journey of life that is strikingly similar to The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. Our narrator in The Wall at least has her animal companions to domesticate and breathe life into. Our narrator in I Who Have Never Known Men only has animal companions in the most unforgiving sense. She, along with 39 other women, have been forced into an underground bunker, guarded all day and night by male guards and stripped of their basic humanity. These 39 women, being older than our narrator and having experienced a life outside of the cage, are unable to fully confront the grief that lies in their future and the realization that there is nothing left for them. The best of life is over.
“If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought.”
These women, having pasts of their own to retreat into, do not hold out hope unlike our narrator. As such, she likens them to animals - content in their day-to-day routine, never bothering to learn skills beyond what is needed for their basic survival. One day, everything changes. While the guards are unlocking the gates to give the women their daily rations, a siren sounds and the guards flee the bunker without hesitation. The women are free to traverse up the staircase and into the world. What they find is nothing but empty plains for miles. In many ways, the women believe they are not much freer roaming the plains than down in the bunker. Could they have been freer, perhaps, if they had not been socially conditioned with bare minimum all of those years in the bunker? What if they never had the toxic shock of knowing a past with love?
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
After years of excursions and temporary dwellings, one by one the other women drop from physical illness, despair, suicide or a whole combination platter, shifting the community from a nomadic lifestyle to that of sedentary dwellers. Our narrator puts up with this, and even enjoys the craft of building, but still yearns to explore the plains for answers. In the meantime, she gains a new role within the make-shift village: the executioner. Being the one who is most unburdened by love and human emotion, she has volunteered to stab any suffering women in the heart to relieve them of their painful existence. Eventually, she is the only woman left standing and can yet again explore as she pleases. Despite understanding the statistical grimness of her fate, she continues to venture into the open plains, even after discovering bunker after bunker filled with dead bodies. Though two years of walking yields merely fragments of new information such as a rusty bus on the side of the road full of corpses and a book on gardening, she presses on.
“Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others.”
Although this book is spans many exisential topics, I think much of it is a beautiful parallel to aging. As we age, our sense of time is warped; we are no longer growing as rapidly as we did in our youth, both physically and mentally, and our sense of the world shrinks. This is largely due to our loss of structured environment. After we graduate from schooling, we are left merely wandering in this world. It may take two years to stumble upon the conclusion we desperately needed to renew our hope and continue walking on, whereas when we were young perhaps it only took two weeks. Some of us now wait around to die, living day-to-day as if it were only matter-of-fact and nothing more. Some live still entangled in their youth and slowly choking out. Some of us are like the narrator in that we are stubborn and unwilling to accept what is in front of us for better or for worse. Perhaps we never had the experience of love so deep in the first place, and thus we are not content to merely revel in its loss. Instead, we gravitate towards the haunting warmth behind the question "why?", as if it were a still-beating-but-barely human heart. And we will do anything to find an answer. Seeing our narrator lose her way along the road in the plains, construct new routes and new ways of measuring progress, as well as moving in and out between demanding answers and leaving them to dry is cathartic and life-affirming in its own unique way.
Winding Down, Diseased & Dying Out
“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”
What is the result of this beautiful life of WHY? In the end, while aware of her impending death, our narrator can't help but retreat into her own past, no matter how shallow (some might say) the breadth of her experience. She thinks of herself as the girl in the bunker again, who taunted the young guard with her stare, angry at the present as if she had a future. She was never able to answer a single of her questions, other than explore the thought that maybe the guards had little autonomy or awareness of the situation and they all lived and died in the dark together. Even the books she has acquired, though entertaining, cannot answer anything real for her. In the end, what was real and true?
We can be oppressed by male guards, existence itself, or the vastness of the stars - perhaps the only distraction for us is solace in each other. But our narrator, who was conditioned against the warmth of love by the sound of the whip down in the bunker, never found herself able to accept that kind of fate.
“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.”
In the beginning she is characterized by a sense of superiority over the older women due to her thirst for the truth, and conversely the older women pity her for never experiencing real life: love, the changing of the seasons, silk dresses, music, dancing and so on and so forth. In the end she realizes she has no idea what she has been doing, but it hasn't made her happy. But even if she lived a life like the other 39 women, she would have still died some day, and doesn't seem to blatantly regret her decisions - because what else was there to do? What choice did she have?
Our narrator, the human clock, who learned to estimate the hour of the day with her own heartbeat, must walk on and create time rather than take it for a given that it has been created for her. She figures that is why she wrote this: to create time through written word, and to hand it off to a future reader, to give them a time in their mind, her thoughts in their mind. Closeness, mingling, something living even after she is long dead. In the end, she passes away from a disease in the womb.
“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”