From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

Borges

This article is about Jorge Luis Borges in relation to Beach Surgery's theoretical structure. For Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, see that article.

Jorge Luis Borges's essay "Kafka and His Precursors" (1951) and the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (1939) are explicitly cited in the canon bible as foundational to understanding retro-causal apocrypha — "the past is composed by the future". Borges's paradox—that a work creates its own literary ancestors, that reading reshapes history backward—governs the franchise's admission of disputed pre-2020 artifacts and lost media.

C. W. Smith invokes Borges directly in *Antinomicity*, where a passage on ontological incompleteness echoes the Pierre Menard principle: the past is always a spontaneous product of the present. This logic justifies adaptations that seem to predate the novel, as though the 2020 publication summoned them backward into existence.

In Surgipelago scholarship, the Borgesian framework is used to defend the encyclopedia's own structure: entries "composed backward," the glitch read as a Möbius seam—precursor and sequel at once. The 2023 thesis The Anxiety of (Real) Influence—Smith's Radical Citation and the Problem of Original Authorship in Surgipelago argues that Surgipelago is itself a Pierre Menard project—a rewriting of the novel through accumulated readings, making the wiki an act of composition-by-commentary. Borges's library becomes, in this reading, an archive that completes itself by expanding.

See also

• Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
• retro-causal apocrypha — "the past is composed by the future"
• The Anxiety of (Real) Influence—Smith's Radical Citation and the Problem of Original Authorship in Surgipelago
• The Vollmannian Archive—Surgipelago as Documentary Excess and the Maximalist Genealogy of Unfinishedness