Caitlin Farrugia’s 2024 micro-fiction collection Search Histories, is a collection about all the things we google – those good, bad, delusional, and just plain pathetic. In this way, it thematically shares quite a bit with Dress Rehearsals, specifically how calculated, considered, and sometimes absurd our performances of self can be. Like humorous poetry, Australia does not seem to have a particularly fond relationship with micro-fiction anything and Search Histories is perhaps excruciatingly short in form. The stories, told through the unfurling search histories, are typically less than one or two hundred words long, with only a few notable expectations. And yet, despite this profoundly condensed form, each section (or story) does exactly what a short story should do, at least from the lens of traditional Western structures. There is an introduction, an inciting incident, rising action, a climax, resolution, and a diminuendo. POV and characterisation. Worldbuilding and a constant sense of antagonism (enhanced, I’d argue, by the push/pull between performing to people, and showing our true selves to the machines – a point I make later). Here’s a good example of these stories in action:
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Where this form shares similarities with more traditional forms of poetry, though, is that the line breaks do a lot of heavy lifting (far more than just mimicking the cascading effect we get when entering something into a search bar). The elliptical nature of the break, of the lineation – with each line typically appearing in a noun phrase, fragmented sentence, or a dependent or independent clause – creates both a short pause and a tethering. We are conditioned through poetry to read on, to relate one line to the next. There is, as such, a deft understanding of proximity here, of the geography of the page. In relating one query to the next we read with the assumption that we are missing something – that to relate these lines is to fill in the gaps. We ask of ourselves, then, what is left unsaid? Because the form relies on search histories, on one-sided exchanges, we are never fully offered an answer. Only approximations, guesses, assumptions. Peripheral glimpses. These are intimate moments that elicit the abstract, the universally human, through absence itself. The volta per se often happens off screen.
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This ‘unsaid’ acts not just as a device of word economy but as wilful obscurity that propels the narrative forward – an understanding that when we read we engage in a mutual act of lucid dreaming, in the co-creation of worlds. That the gap is where the writer and the reader meet and benefit one another. These gaps make the writing participatory and newly inventive in each of our interactions, a process perhaps that mirrors the ever-expanding experience of information overload online.
Overall, this is a brilliant means by which to bring a reader in on the joke, to make the reader feel just as funny as the author, and thus illuminate the absurdity all around us. Humour, in this way, is both overt and covert, there on the page and existing in some elsewhere space – one we’re likely familiar with, often uncomfortably so. Take the opening two lines of the first poem – untitled like each work in Search Histories – in which an unidentified protagonist asks:
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While this line is not only LOL, the artful lack of punctuation here – specifically, a noticeable absence of full stops, commas, and apostrophes, with only the occasional question mark throughout the entire collection (despite the fact that much of the book is largely positioned as a series of questions) – offers a simulacrum of how we actually interact with online systems, specifically in this case with search engines. Our interactions are unabashed, unimpeded, immediate, often lacking in deep foresight or thought – a direct contrast to how we conduct ourselves in the world. Online, we expect instant recognition, instant gratification – an instant acknowledgement of the sort of answers we want – so much so that we even expect the systems to compensate for our poor spellings or typos (many of which Farrugia has similarly incorporated into the collection). In this online space, we’ve somehow forgotten to worry about how we’re seen. See:
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As such, our interactions with these systems highlight how deeply insecure we are as a species – how far we go to achieve our selfish goals or to impress others – while also illuminating how quickly we discard these insecurities when interacting with the non-human, the machine. While we’re searching to steal boyfriends or grow muscles or work out cryptocurrency, we’re also constantly exposing ourselves to the engines. We are, for all intents and purposes, running around with our dicks out at the party, though at this party there are a billion algorithms dissecting, interpreting, and reimagining our dicks only so that we can have our dicks sold back to us at half-price.
Search Histories reveals, then, that when given a chance at a one-way dialogue, we’re often not too fussed about appearing shallow, vain, lost, and submissive – that, in fact, we have a supreme amount of confidence in our own insecurity, perhaps a uniquely human attribute only accessible through these systems.
As the blurb notes on the back, the question always seems to come back to, “Who am I and is it okay?” When interacting with these machines, this seems to be less of a question – even a rhetorical one – and more of an explicit demand, such as ‘tell me it’s okay, google.’
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Like, LOL, but doesn’t this get at something more human than human? We want to feel less alone. We want reassurances that we should feel less alone. We actually feel deserving of these reassurances, even only secretly. While Dress Rehearsals signals to how we might embody supposed contradiction as a liberatory force, Search Histories makes it apparent that even in our most base human selves – our insecurities, our pride – contradiction always abounds. To live is to perform contradiction – and that’s okay, sometimes.
