From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

C. W. Smith

This article is about the author. For the narrator of the novel, who closely resembles him, see the narrator (redirects here).

C. W. Smith (Craig Warren Smith) is an Australian writer based in Newcastle, and the author of A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (2020). Beach Surgery is one node in a larger, tightly interlinked body of work — novels, novellas, prose, poetry, essays, radio and stage plays, and digital pieces — that returns obsessively to walking, Newcastle (mythologised elsewhere as "Supernovacastria"), the depopulated "empty world," collected "disjecta," pastoral land repurposed as data, and the contradiction Smith names ontological incompleteness.^[1] Within the novel the narrator is an unnamed researcher of children's play whose biography shadows Smith's own.^[2]

Selected works

Essays include Subject (Ontological Incompleteness), Beyond Correct and Incorrect Nature, Polyacoustic and Nothingness Mirror; the radio plays Prompt and Selector; and digital works including Weather Window and the Newcastle psychogeography games Ridin' Newcastle and Play Newcastle: Gregson Park.

Recurring concerns

Smith's essay Subject (Ontological Incompleteness) supplies the philosophical key to much of his work, and to Beach Surgery in particular: consciousness as "an analogy of itself," the subject as an irreducible split — a Möbius-shaped gap between the real and the ideal.

That gap is you.— Subject (Ontological Incompleteness)

This is the same gap the novel dramatises as the glitch and figures as the coin with only one side. Beyond Correct and Incorrect Nature gives the essay-register version of this ethic — "Nature is perfect, but we are not" — echoing the novel's close, while Antinomicity rehearses, years earlier, the love of empty quarters, the drain-walks, and a fall from a cliff that uncannily prefigures Leif's dive for the boy in the waves.

Relation to Beach Surgery

• Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters opens a trilogy — Their Most August Public Organ and Surplus of the Seen — whose final volume sets out to recreate the novel through the author and his wife's real-world exploration and philosophy; Surgipelago is its media-side counterpart.
• The data-farmed countryside of the novel's second half echoes the hacked agricultural systems of Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time.
• The Empty World Meditations recur as a sequence across Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters.
• Smith's recurring citation of Gerald Murnane — the novel's epigraph author — runs throughout the oeuvre.

Scholars caution against collapsing author and narrator entirely; see the standard thesis.

See also

• the eruption · Les · the bird on the rail line · Ontological incompleteness

References

1. ↑ Author site, wrenasmir.com.
2. ↑ Smith, C. W. A Complicated Surgery…, 2020.