From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Antinomicity (Smith's novella)
This article covers C. W. Smith's 2022 novella. For the philosophical concept, see Antinomy (concept).
Antinomicity is Book Two of Smith's triptych. See Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters (Book One) and Surplus of the Seen (Book Three, forthcoming).
Antinomicity (2022, ~36,000 words) is C. W. Smith's second novella, structured as preface + chapters I–IV + epilogue. It traces two journeys: a father and young son through Newcastle TAFE, industrial drain, and gasworks; and a father and daughter by train southward, interrupted by the full text of Smith's philosophical essay Subject (Ontological Incompleteness).
Chapter III, the structural heart, elaborates consciousness as irreducible gap—"that gap is you"—using the Möbius strip. The chapter is then interrupted by a corrupted train recording "stretched 8× into a bag full of alarm clocks dragged to the bottom of an empty public pool," echoing the novel's alarm-clock baptism. Chapter IV relocates to a convict cabin near Wollombi, where "cyanotype conjoined leaves"—two leaves grown in a state of antinomicity, neither reducible to one—name the title itself and image the philosophical thesis. A GPS projector casts "a palimpsest of family time" upon a wall.
Antinomicity shares Beach Surgery's motifs of the cycle, Möbius recursion, and retro-causal consciousness ("the past is always a spontaneous product of the present"). Though it contains near-verbatim Beach Surgery imagery and philosophical kinship, Leif and Katita do not appear by name.