From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Alexandria
This article concerns a 2019 academic thesis on C. W. Smith's oeuvre. For the historical city, see w:Alexandria.
"Alexandria and the Unfinishable Library" is a 2019 doctoral thesis examining the novel's treatment of archives, spatial memory, and the recursive impossibility of total knowledge, tracing the glitch as a deliberate instantiation of what the author terms the "Alexandrian paradox"—the library that aspires to contain everything while systematizing its own erasure.
The thesis argues that Rico the Architect's embedded tale, wherein functional cities grow inside human bodies yet never within Rico himself (no mirror works), allegorizes the classical library's fatal gap: between its promise of exhaustive knowledge and the inevitable gap of what cannot be archived. The author maps this onto the novel's spatial structure—two halves that refuse to cohere—proposing that the glitch functions not as narrative failure but as formal truth: the same principle that animated Alexandria.
Crucially, the thesis argues Surgipelago realizes this principle as living archive. Each adaptation resolves the glitch *differently*, thus the fan-encyclopedia grows by fragmenting—rebuilding Alexandria endlessly, scattering it endlessly. The work sits at the intersection of C. W. Smith's philosophy essay Subject (Ontological Incompleteness) and maritime history. Reception among scholars remains divided on whether this reading recuperates the glitch as generative or merely names its irreducibility. [citation needed]