From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Joyce's Night-Language and the Unjoined Glitch
This thesis argues for a deep structural affinity between Joyce's Finnegans Wake and C. W. Smith's Beach Surgery, treating the Wake as a philosophical and formal precursor. The argument remains contested in Beach Surgery scholarship [citation needed].
A doctoral dissertation arguing that James Joyce's Finnegans Wake operates according to the same structural logic as Beach Surgery's glitch—namely, the simultaneous occupation of two irreconcilable narrative states within a single textual body.
The thesis traces how Joyce's *portmanteau consciousness*—the technique of fusing two words, two meanings, two grammatical directions into a single syllable—is precisely the operation of the glitch. The Wake's famous opening line, which ends mid-word and begins the opposite direction ("riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs..."), thinks forward and backward simultaneously. It is a sentence that refuses to choose a direction. Similarly, Beach Surgery's Half One and Half Two cannot be joined because joining would annihilate the cycle.
The author argues that both Smith and Joyce are attempting to represent consciousness itself—not as a linear narrative but as a Möbius folding where inside and outside, beginning and end, father and son, are not opposites but a single continuous surface. In the Wake, HCE (Here Comes Everybody) is simultaneously father, son, city, and text. In Beach Surgery, Leif and Katita are lovers, instruments of recurrence, and the narrator's wife and unborn daughter.
Critically, the thesis contests the reading of the glitch as a flaw. Rather, it is the signature of a text attempting to think two thoughts at once—a refusal of closure that is itself a form of care.
The work received commendation for theoretical innovation but was critiqued by an external examiner as "over-identifying Joyce with Smith without sufficient textual justification" and for "imposing a Joycean framework retroactively onto Smith's prose, which does not cite Wake directly" [1]. The dissertation remains a touchstone for formalist approaches to the glitch.
See also
- the glitch
- The Unjoined Sentence—Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Apocalyptic Breath and the Glitch as Syntax
- Subject (Ontological Incompleteness)
- Möbius consciousness
- Language is a game of fictions
References
- ↑ Examination report, ████