Tom Simpson
Notes on ‘Enter’ by Katie Smith

Criticism

“What we find changes who we are,” writes the inimitable Peter Morville. Or, as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha asks of Govinda, “What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”

These quotes, as well as the name Peter Morville, are new to me; seconds ago, I Googled “meaningful quotes about searching,” and there they were, like home delivery at the speed of light. Katie Smith’s ‘Enter’ – published in Splinter’s second issue – is a short story in a new form, the internet search history. Through its sequence of searches, the reader develops an unsettling intimacy with the protagonist, coded as a young woman struggling in Melbourne. There is an undeniable ugliness to the form, with its terseness, banality, and frankness, like the yearnings of an adult-sized infant rendered in stream-of-consciousness bullet points. Yet it feels unnervingly familiar, even voyeuristic: reading it, we recognise that our own search histories likely betray something similar about ourselves. This symmetry humanises the central character in a way that collides incongruously with the essential limitations of the prose. The effect strangely recalls the neuroscientific phenomenon of face blindness, or prosopagnosia: one can vividly picture the protagonist while also having no idea what she looks like.

In their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the data scientists Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas examine internet search histories and statistics about pornography and erotica use, in turn developing a picture of human sexuality that, as the authors put it, is informed by what we do when we think no-one is looking. This is, of course, the same dynamic that plays out in ‘Enter’. A Billion Wicked Thoughts features numerous anonymised search histories from pornography-using AOL subscribers. Most of these search histories are unremarkable, some are deeply disturbing, and a few are very funny:

college cheerleaders
cheerleaders in Hawaii
pics of bikinis and girls
the sin of masturbation
pretty girls in bikinis
girls suntanning in bikinis
college cheerleader pics in bikinis
noooooooo
christian advice on lust

The above search history, like the one in ‘Enter’, provides an identifiable narrative, with both a character and a meaningful chronology, a kind of ersatz act structure. However, search histories with such discernible narratives are rare. The typical log in A Billion Wicked Thoughts reads like a kind of inanely nonsensical longform take on the haiku, with sexual fetishes juxtaposed against irrelevant searches on personal hygiene and consumer products:

family nude beach
older men younger women
french country decor
i am in love with him
italian framed art
jealousy between friends
friends jealous after weight loss
anna nicole smith nude
linens & things
labioplasty
celebs pics
free **** movies
what does sex mean to a man
how do men feel about sex
elizabeth montgomery naked
why are single women attracted to married men
when will i see results of pilates

These search histories are still instructive: even when you remove sex from the equation, a search history is necessarily about the pornography of wanting, of seeking something real, be it love or Italian framed art, in a place where nothing real exists. This tension is deftly represented in ‘Enter’, where the searches for consumer products – the protagonist certainly likes sneakers – are interweaved with a pathetic and almost certainly futile longing for self-improvement and connection (for example, “art course online” or the many searches that begin with the word “become”). It is only at the story’s conclusion that pornography makes an appearance. The real search histories in A Billion Wicked Thoughts differ from the one in ‘Enter’ in that they are even more discordantly random: requests for information on home humidity and videogames slide guilelessly into marathon pornography search sessions.

There are parallels between the apparent but perhaps illusory realism of the search history in ‘Enter’ and so-called naturalistic direct dialogue in more conventional literature. George Saunders famously recorded and transcribed his family’s dinner table conversations, hoping to gain insight into “real” naturalistic dialogue. But Saunders found that his transcriptions were incomprehensible: ungrammatical hodge podges of grunts, run-on sentences, sentence fragments, words-as-sentences, and extended silences where unrecorded gestures had presumably taken the place of oral conversation. The text was more like infant echolalia than the famed direct dialogue of so-called naturalistic dialogue writers like Jane Austen or Tom Wolfe. Comparing the search history in ‘Enter’ with those in A Billion Wicked Thoughts, as well as my own and a friend’s, I was struck by something similar: the search history in ‘Enter’ is disjointed and repetitive enough to seem convincing, but when placed against real search histories its thoughtful construction becomes clear. It sketches a plausible character, replete with longing and vulnerability. In contrast, real search histories often feel more like the fever dreams of consumer culture obsessives, filled with monotonous searches about brands, availability, and shipping. This distinction also recalls an observation from David Lodge’s novel Changing Places, regarding the difference between real life and literature: literature is never about what it is about, whereas real life is all too painfully about what it is about. Real search histories often betray a monomaniacal fixation on the object being searched for, while revealing little about the person doing the searching. ‘Enter’, on the other hand, is not really about true-to-size sneakers and Jennifer Aniston’s botox.

According to linguist John McWhorter, the hyper-informality of anglosphere instant messaging represents not a degradation of English but rather a whole new form of written language, one that has arisen from the transposition of spoken conversation into text. A similar claim could be made for the prose in ‘Enter’, which is so syntactically stunted that even word order barely matters. I recently attended a symposium on Finnegans Wake, a novel that is often heralded as a breakdown of the English language but, as Professor Paul Magee from the University of Canberra noted, is written in a style that, while lexically bizarre, is grammatically and syntactically conventional. This grants a sense of consoling familiarity: however odd the prose might seem, it still comes from a human mind. On the other hand, the language in ‘Enter’, while lexically familiar, is syntactically alien. “Become micro influencer,” for instance, is not an English sentence, despite the everydayness of the words. This recombination of the lexically mundane with the syntactically abnormal generates the inverse affective response to the text in Finnegans Wake, conveying intimations of inhumanity, alienation, and personal irrelevance. The stunted language of the search history also limits our capacity to react to it: it deadens our immediate affective response, yet on a more analytic level we are aware of the numbing effect of the language. This complexity mirrors the reader’s recognition that the protagonist’s life is simultaneously unremarkable and tragic.

(An interesting third case exists in which sentences are both syntactically and lexically familiar but semantically incoherent. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” provide well-known examples. Such sentences initially seem to make perfect sense, but when considered more consciously their incoherence becomes clear.)

In her treatise Ugly Feelings, theorist Sianne Ngai identifies an affective state that she terms stuplimity, “the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom”. In their repetitiveness, randomness, and stupidity, search histories like the one in ‘Enter’ can make for strangely propulsive reading, with their oftentimes trivial permutations of essentially the same search recalling the factory-like reproduction of prints and multiples by certain visual artists, or the endless cycle of death and rebirth that takes place in many videogames. Despite this, they fall short of generating true stuplimity in that their repetitiveness, while tedious and occasionally amusing, is never enough to truly astonish; that is to say, they gesture at such repetition, but do not enact it. For instance, consider the opening of the short story ‘Grammar Questions’ by Lydia Davis, which is hypnotic because it repeats its examination of tense to the point of exhaustion:

Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, “This is where he lives”?

If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” should I answer, “Well, right now he is not living, he is dying”?

If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” can I say, “He lives in Vernon Hall”? Or should I say, “He is dying in Vernon Hall”?

When he is dead, I will be able to say, in the past tense, “He lived in Vernon Hall.” I will also be able to say, “He died in Vernon Hall.”

When he is dead, everything to do with him will be in the past tense. Or rather, the sentence “He is dead” will be in the present tense, and also questions such as “Where are they taking him?” or “Where is he now?”

But then I won’t know if the words he and him are correct, in the present tense. Is he, once he is dead, still “he,” and if so, for how long is he still “he”?

People may say “the body” and then call it “it.” I will not be able to say “the body” in relation to him because to me he is still not something you would call “the body.”

People may say “his body,” but that does not seem right either. It is not “his” body because he does not own it, if he is no longer active or capable of owning anything.

On the other hand, the repetition in ‘Enter’ is just boring, in a very pathetic, very mundane way. There is an implicit distinction here between what we as the reader recognise as tedious and repetitive and what the protagonist presumably recognises. Jonathan Franzen once observed that, in literature, the comedy of not knowing, where the comic character is oblivious to their own ridiculousness, cleaves closely to the tragedy of not knowing, where the tragic character is unaware of the fate they are careening towards. We see aspects of both forms of unknowing in the repetitive searches in ‘Enter’, which are pathetically tedious without self-awareness on the part of the protagonist.

Flash fiction (including, in the case of ‘Enter’, flash fiction published under the moniker of poetry) has always thrived on elision and omission, and the ability of the reader’s mind to paint a far richer picture by filling in the blanks in the text, just as the brain so flawlessly completes the ocular blind spot. What distinguishes the search history form is the naturalness of this minimalism. This is not only because of a search history’s essential economy of language, but also because it is a history of searches: these naturally reflect longing, desire, wanting. On a (very) superficial level, they inherently conform to the typical first year creative writing advice that good characters are active characters, steadfastly pursuing their goals. However, the vacuous repetitiveness of entries in a search history mean that their implied goals are, in a characterological sense, fake currency: how much value can a goal like “best skincare brand hormonal breakouts” really have, especially if it is almost immediately followed by “become a van life influencer”? There is an unusual contrast here with the infamous six-word short story, commonly misattributed to Hemmingway, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” (citing this story is a bad cliché in flash fiction criticism, but it is too relevant here to avoid). Like ‘Enter’, ‘Baby shoes’ constructs a fictional story by exploiting the context of a recognisable non-literary form. But unlike ‘Enter’, ‘Baby Shoes’ is pure mawkishness, with its six words implying a narrative that, while ambiguous in terms of specific events, is almost comically obvious in its suggestions of missed potential and possible tragedy. This is the polar opposite of the pathos in ‘Enter’, which primarily derives from the vacuity of the searches rather than their content, and from the white space that exists between them.

(As an aside, while fictional search histories like ‘Enter’ feel formally at home in the flash fiction genre, real search histories seem like closer cousins of stream-of-consciousness writing. If anything, they are more authentic, as stream-of-consciousness writing is typically created with the intent, or at least hope, of creating something worthwhile; this ambition inevitably intrudes upon the writing, colouring it with a self-conscious inventiveness that rarely reflects our true selves. Search histories, in comparison, are pristinely honest: they log our real, unfiltered mediocrity, one tap of the enter key at a time.)

The story’s conclusion is perhaps the only point in which the reader receives a direct insight into the narrator’s present-tense psychological convolutions. This immediacy signifies a stark departure from the rest of the story. The moment also gives resonance to the title, making it more pertinent than the obvious alternative – ‘Search’. The word “enter” is relevant to every search in the story, but especially, I think, to this final one; this one act of deletion also begs the question of how many times this act of deletion has taken place before, and will reoccur in future: is the reader simply witnessing yet another iteration of an endless loop? The idea of a story’s title – that is, the reader’s very first encounter with the story, even before the first sentence – relating so specifically to its ending also recalls those stories and novels that suggest an infinite narrative loop; again, we return to Finnegans Wake, as well as Infinite Jest and other recursive narratives. There is also something cruelly witty about it: the reader might be entering the protagonist’s world, and the protagonist might be tapping the enter button, but in reality the protagonist is entering very little. With every search, especially the final one, the narrative confounds the liminal connotations of the story’s title. Ultimately, ‘Enter’ provides a potent, and memorably unique, depiction of loneliness and stasis.

Read the Enter in Issue 2

Tom Simpson is currently completing an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. He is interested in flash fiction and the works of Grace Paley and Lydia Davis. Tom was part of the editorial committee for Splinter's second issue.

Katie Smith is a director and writer originally from the UK now living on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Her creative practice currently spans theatre, literature, new and devised work, music, and opera.

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