I, Who Have Never Known Complexity

Life’s meaning does not come from subsistence, or comfort, or pleasure, but from something richer that is difficult to define. For as long as our cultural consciousness has existed, we have searched for that missing spark. Jacqueline Harpman, a psychoanalyst raised in the traditions of European existentialism, is all-too-familiar with this search, and her concise novel I Who Have Never Known Men explores human sense-making in a particularly precise manner. The plot is spare: on a barren, otherworldly planet, a group of women are held captive by omnipotent and stone-faced guards. When they escape, they grapple with an empty world where the only guards that remain are those inside their own minds. The narrator, a woman whose entire lifespan is encompassed by the novel, never finds the meaning for which she searches. She never experiences life in its entirety; never experiences the state of anxiety that the existentialists teach is an unavoidable symptom of an authentic life. In short, what she is missing, and what Harpman argues is the key to life’s richness, is complexity.

Complexity is an inverse function of predictability. To define complexity and measure it, information theory asks: given a point-in-time, and all events that occurred before it, how predictable is the next event?¹. Can one reliably determine the future from the past? The less predictable something is, the more complex, and, Harpman would argue, the more meaningful. This is perhaps counterintuitive; most of us crave stability rather than unpredictability, a tension between want and need to which we will return. What generates complexity in a life? It is not simply randomness. There are those people who seem to disproportionally suffer at the hand of an unjust universe, trial after trial thrown their way. Facing such an unending stream of disturbances, it is impossible to get our bearings. In effect, too much randomness forces a survival mindset — a paradoxically simple mode of living. A truly complex life is the product of a relationship between three conditions: compressibility, periodicity, and conflict. Each of these is necessary but not sufficient. Their interaction is what generates the complexity.

To begin with, compressibility is, in this context, the extent to which something can be simplified with no loss of informational content. It is perhaps the most overt of the three conditions throughout Harpman’s novel. There are mathematical ways to describe and quantify compressibility, but the concept is intuitive enough. A stream of colour, which alternates red and blue for eternity, could either be described infinitely, “red, blue, red, blue…”, or compressed and summed up in its entirety as “red, blue, repeated forever”. But if a coin toss is inserted to choose each colour, such that the decision between red and blue is completely random, the sequence must be described for eternity, “red, red, blue, red, blue…”. It is now much less compressible. Expand this sequence to the entire spectrum of the rainbow and compressibility drops even further².

How does this concept apply to a life? Consider, to begin with, the unit of a day. If, through necessity or routine, all days are very similar, in that they all follow the same pattern, then the life is highly compressible. The narrator captures the malaise that this can engender:

I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things… nothing happened other than this repetition of identical gestures, and time seemed to stand still.

As humans, routine is our default mode. It takes a vast deal of libidinal energy to accomplish the business of survival. If we can offload as much as possible to the crutch of routine and structure, we can conserve that energy. Externalising decision-making is an energy-preservation strategy, and evolutionarily advantageous. The ego aims at reducing collisions with the environment, not as a deliberate goal, but as a means of animalistic self-preservation.

In the novel, there are two types of routine that lead to compression, which are differentiated by their locus of control. The first type is external — in the bunker, the guards, through coercion and environmental manipulation, enforce a routine, one that allows the women to subsist and subsist alone. Such external routines are imposed throughout life by social forces, from the pressures of family to the demands of capitalism. Harpman portrays the guards as dispassionate, non-sadistic, precisely due to this parallel: there is often no single agent behind an external routine; it is an accident generated by the interactions between many. The second type is internal. Once freed, the women settle quickly again into mechanical sameness. The narrator tries to find projects to occupy herself, to break up the drudgery, but to no avail. Through the growth of the narrator, from a child in the cage to an adult in the wider world, Harpman reflects the process of Jungian ego individuation. As described by Murray Stein:

Typically a young person lives with an illusion of much greater self-control and free will than is psychologically true. All the limitations on freedom seem to be imposed from the outside, from society and external regulations, and there is little awareness of how the ego is just as much controlled from within. Closer reflection reveals that one is as enslaved to one’s own character structure and inner demons as to external authority³.

The narrator thus finds that, without external rules to rebel against, she must confront the constraints she imposes on herself.

There is a trap inherent in this discussion of compressibility: the idea that novelty alone can resolve the problem. When the women escape the cage they are thrust into a world of new knowledge and new experience. The first bunker they discover is entirely novel, but by the tenth the thrill has lessened, and by the hundredth it has dissipated entirely. Scale destroys novelty. With a handful of examples, it is the differences between the bunkers that are most apparent: how their inhabitants died, the available foodstuffs, the arrangement of the chambers. But after encountering hundreds, the focus shifts to the similarities. So it is for days and years, compressed under the weight of monotony. Salience is deadened by repetition. Subtle variance in the days and weeks, scattered novelty, is not enough to escape compressibility.

But novelty is not entirely without use. Compression is a de-individualising process, and eventually the soul will rebel. This manifests in a desire for change and new experience. The extent to which this is sought depends on progress along the path of de-individualisation. The narrator is young, and has not yet succumbed to the worst of it. Hence she is the only character who tries to generate a wholly new experience, for better or for worse, by staring down a prison guard in the hopes of provoking a reaction. The other women are mostly resigned to their fate, but even then, they cherish each day the permutations of experience available to them through cooking, limited as they are; whether to add meat or potatoes to the pot first. Without these micro-variations, they have nothing. They are unable to even age themselves, unsure if they are thirty or forty; such is the anonymising and de-individualising power of a compressed life.

Compression works too on scales beyond the daily routine. Any unit of repetition can undergo compression, from the structure of a work-week to an entire year, delineated by seasons and holiday transitions. In general, the longer that unit of repetition, the higher the chance of something novel occurring, and the lower the compressibility. We are more likely to remember what occurred in a particular year than on a particular day.

This point brings us to the second necessary factor for a complex life: periodicity, that tendency of life to repeat itself in cyclic waves of various lengths. Perhaps the definition of compression implies that periodicity is negative; that a cyclic life of repetition is stale and devoid of novelty, and new informational content. But this is the case only when periodicity is limited; when there are one or two cycles, and no more. Observe the alien setting of the novel: there are no real seasons, no weather patterns or drastic changes of temperature. There is a bland greyness within which it is impossible for the women to truly orient themselves. The only real period of repetition is the day, which, as we have seen, is simple to compress.

What happens if we increase the number of different cycles? Imagine a sine wave, a gentle curve which undulates up-and-down. When the cycle repeats each day, the distance between peaks is short; when it repeats each year, the distance is longer. Complexity begins to develop when we overlap the cycles, adding them together. Where there were once two perfectly-regular curves, now there is one with slightly more informational content, a curve that repeats on a small-scale, but also ebbs and flows over the course of a year.

But this cycle is still not complex: it’s perfectly predictable, perfectly-compressible. The missing piece is irregularity. Imagine a third cycle which still repeats, but does so at an irregular interval — sometimes, it takes 28 days, sometimes 30. Gradually this cycle moves out-of-sync with the previous two. When added to them, the most beautiful complexity emerges. The cycles interfere with each other both constructively and destructively: great peaks jut out like mountains, and there are regions of flatness where the component cycles cancel each other out. This interference pattern is richer and more complex, and it reduces the compressibility of the life.

From where do these irregular cycles actually originate? One important source is biological. The narrator laments that, having had her puberty arrested prematurely, she has “never known periods”⁴. The menstrual cycle provides one off-set, semi-irregular cycle. Within it, mood can change dramatically, and depending on where a person is within the cycle, their reaction to the same stimulus varies wildly. There are similar hormonal cycles in men, too, albeit on a smaller scale. The loss of the narrator’s period is the loss of an essential complexifying ingredient; coupled with the lack of planetary seasons, the options for interacting cycles are limited. Only sameness can result.

Irregular cycles come from within, too. The contents of the psyche, including complexes and their interruptions into consciousness, often operate periodically. A week of particular anxiety may give way to eight days of contentedness and psychic uncomplication, providing another off-set to the regular, predictable cycles of life. But these complexes are borne of collisions with the outside world, conflicts between ego and environment, and trauma. All these things are limited and lacking in the sterile environment in which the narrator resides.

All this is to say that the combination of compressibility and periodicity, and in particular their entanglement, brings us closer to describing that mysterious missing element in the narrator’s life. But even these are not enough. No matter how complex the interference pattern created, and its level of compressibility, it is still essentially determinate. It is missing one final element, one source of chaotic influence: conflict. This is Harpman’s central thesis; it is given away by the title of the novel. Yes, narrator has never known men, males⁵, but the author again relies on double-sense. The narrator has also never known Men, humankind. She has never experience true conflict, in the sense of a true clash of ideology or motivation.

Throughout the novel the women engage in minor squabbles, to be sure, but these seem to be precipitated by those human urges toward novelty and rejection of the familiar. There is no meeting of alien minds, as there is when women and men interact. It is no coincidence that when imprisoned the narrator tries desperately to provoke any reaction whatsoever from the male guard, even negative — the important element that is missing from her life is truly unpredictable conflict. The life experience of the women in captivity is so similar that their conflict cannot be anything but predetermined; they know the same fight will occur every day over the cooking, but they go through the motions regardless.

Unpredictable conflict is the final complexifying element. Even a brief injection of conflict into a life can shift the whole pattern into a different configuration, one which is entirely random and incompressible. When we are engaged with life to the fullest, living authentically, such shocks come again and again; they are a necessary condition for that fulfilment. The primary purpose for conflict, to take the teleological viewpoint, is to escape the local maximum: that point in life at which we settle into routine, stasis, the good-enough. By adding additional energy the conflict jolts us from comfort and forces life to seek out a new maximum.

There are two major shocks, inflection-points, in the novel. The first occurs when the women escape the cage, and the second occurs, to a lesser extent, when the narrator is left alone after the others one-by-one grow old and die. What is the effect of these external shocks to the system? A period of initial jubilation, and a sense of change. When the drudgery of the cage’s externally-imposed routine is broken, the narrator has grand plans to live freely, according to the whims of her body and not the dictates of the microcosmic society. But the women lapse so quickly back into routine. The shock was enough to shift them out of a local maximum, but the true chains were inside them. Without a constant stream of conflict, complexity trends downwards.

It may at first seem difficult to reconcile this downwards trend in complexity with the law of entropy, that law of the physical world that states that all things move to a more complex state over time. But entropy works in the absence of an agent, and our lives are far from agentless. The agent is the ego. Our internal focus is enough to overcome entropy in the social realm. It acts, in a sense, as an inner Maxwell’s Demon that pushes us towards simplicity and away from conflict. The complex is painful, and beautiful only in hindsight. The ego aims at predictability because it reduces the number of challenging collisions in the world. When the narrator is finally alone, she craves the heightened complexity of the group dynamic:

I felt nostalgic for a moment… I was sometimes acutely aware that I was alone, and always would be, and that the only pleasure within my grasp was the all-too-rare one of satisfied curiosity.

The ego is constantly torn between, on one hand, the drive away from collision and conflict, and on the other, the craving for novelty that draws it towards the very same conflict. A push-and-pull between want and need. This is the dynamic tension of life. From this tension, the full scope of complexity can emerge.

Finally, there is the central mystery of the novel: why do the women exist? Who has brought them to the strange planet, and for what purpose? There is no resolution or closure to the ultimate mystery of their existence. Nor is there a clear purpose for any of us. There is no meaning on which to hang our lives. It is Harpman’s contention that what substitutes for that unattainable meaning is complexity, or, to put it more colloquially, life’s richness and authenticity. The richness that complexity brings cannot be attained without some measure of anxiety, but the opposite of anxiety, resignation, is worse. We watch the narrator grow, individuate and grapple with the world and its inhabitants. She develops a social ego, struggles to find a balance between independence and dependence. But without true complexity it is as if she spends her entire life in a compressible fugue. She has no anxiety because she has nothing to be anxious about. The blandness of the environment, the muted and minimal descriptions: we get the impression that this may not be a real planet at all, but instead something more abstract. A lesson that the state of anxiety is preferable to a stale life bereft of complexity. Because without complexity, an entire life, internal and external, can be compressed into a single slim book.