From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
James Joyce
James Joyce's influence on C. W. Smith's oeuvre operates principally through structural impossibility. Smith's admission in Pastoral Scanlines that the embedded story contains an "irreparable seam" echoes Joyce's recursive architecture—Finnegans Wake begins where it ends, collapsing linearity into eternal return. The glitch, refusing resolution and generative of contradiction, mirrors the Wake's unfinishability.
Joyce's doctrine that language can only talk about language undergirds Smith's Subject (Ontological Incompleteness): consciousness arises when matter reflects on itself analogously. Leif's twelve-word question—unspoken, cryptic—recalls the hermetic riddles of the Wake. Both refuse transparent meaning for multivalent prose.
The franchise's embrace of contradiction inherits from Joyce. Just as Finnegans Wake admits multiple readings simultaneously without cancellation, adaptations resolve the glitch in mutually exclusive ways—a principle instantiated by Joyce and deepened by Smith. Recurrence without resolution is Joyce's gift to the contemporary unfinishable.