and now it's three in the morning

I have a few things I’d like to think about out loud here… firstly, could people not say Jacqueline Harpman is like the feminine/female version of [insert man author]? Cause I love Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but it is in poor taste to reduce a woman author to only her proximity to a man. This is specifically in relation to the quote from Le Nouvel Observateur on the back of my edition, but I have also seen some people on here saying similar things but about different men. This ain’t about them!

Also, could we stop talking about humanity and our relation to animals in the strange way that this book has somehow prompted? Humans are animals and yes this book does have to do with dehumanization—specifically of women and girls—but it feels a bit like people are saying that the disconnect from womanness is something that makes the narrator less human. Certainly, the narrator does discuss those feelings of estrangedness, but she is the narrator! Are we going to believe everything a narrator says? She literally has only known women, so it makes sense that she feels as though femininity as explained by those women are the hallmark of what it would be to be human. But outside of this book do we not understand that the narrator is not more or less of an animal than her counterparts? Than anyone else?

Harpman clearly was aware of queerness and exploring and questioning gender as a construct in this book, why are we repackaging what it means to be a woman in our analyses of it? Yes, gender is real in that it is a construct that affects everyone every day, but no there is not something intrinsically unique about women other than the fact that they are women.

Anyways, on with the discussion! I love the use of counting and communication as ways to occupy the narrator, the search for knowing what she doesn’t know, the sense of unbelonging as well as when she does feel like she belongs, I looooved this. I am so interested in the allegory of the cave being expanded on and made better because there are things to learn and sometimes there are also no answers. And there is fear and anxiety and despair and pain in the new world outside the bunkers, but there is also more freedom of choice, the women are allowed to touch one another, to express anger and love, and eat when they want, sleep when they want, and die when they want.

I’d love to know where they are and when they are, but I’m glad that I don’t know. I appreciate the intentionality behind all of the precious information Harpman gives us through the narrator’s perspective. I imagined every described detail vividly except for the items the narrator couldn’t describe, and I was shocked to realize that others who read it alongside me didn’t imagine the bunker and the landscape at all the way I did!

I am intrigued by the effect of trauma on the narrator’s affinity to solitude and her assumed otherness. Her aversion to touch, her thrill at being able to learn whether it is about the lands surrounding them or woodworking or pre-captivity stories.