How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Science fiction often explores questions about life and the universe. It provides a way to examine the world from new angles. Science fiction and fantasy ask: What would be different if this happened? What would we see about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise as see? One can find such philosophical themes and concerns in much of Gaiman’s work. In “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” he seems to ask, “What might we learn about human life if we interacted with nonhumans?” The alien girls in the story provide perspectives for considering some of these philosophical questions, such as how the universe was created, why any of us are here, and whether there is meaning to our lives. Gaiman seems less concerned with the answers and more interested in the quest to understand. Enn wants to understand girls so he can gain sexual experience. The girls, however, want to understand human life. Their stories show that their travels are intended for this purpose.

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that our thoughts and feelings are structured by language. According to this theory, we can’t understand that for which we don’t have words, and language shapes our experience to make it comprehensible. In “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” words play a large role in all the characters’ understanding of themselves, each other, and their worlds. Vic’s advice to Enn that he just talk to girls seems simple, but the girls’ bizarre stories and strange language complicate this idea. At first, the girls and Enn talk past each other. No one understands anyone, it seems, until Enn listens to Triolet. She addresses language directly. She implies that she is language; she says that she is a “verse form,” which Enn interprets to mean she is a poem. She says that her race collected who they were into a poem so that the universe would understand. She explains that a new race heard the poem, and the poem “colonized” them. She says, “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you” (Paragraph 108). In other words, language shapes who we are.

Triolet whispers to Enn the poem that contains the meaning of her people’s existence, but he “could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat” what he heard (Paragraph 136), suggesting the meaning of existence is ungraspable. Enn also compares Stella to a universe, indicating individuals are as complex and richly layered as the universe. People are micro-universes inside the larger universe. Vic cannot understand what he saw. He gets sick, and he doesn’t have the words to explain to Enn what happened, suggesting again that a person cannot comprehend that for which they don’t have words.