From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Psychogeography and Supernovacastria
This article traces the concept of psychogeography across C. W. Smith's oeuvre. For the city itself, see Newcastle.
Psychogeography—the investigation of how urban geography shapes consciousness and vice versa—recurs throughout C. W. Smith's work as a method of both spatial and metaphysical inquiry. In the novel, Newcastle is figured as a "bite sized labyrinth of streets… harbourside industry and lighthouse shine," where buildings like Rose House and Bolton Street car park are encountered as though by chance, seeming to vanish when not directly observed—instances of ontological incompleteness embedded in the city's fabric.[1]
In Antinomicity, Smith deepens this spatial poetics: "Psychogeography is what propels me forward, in both the physical and the metaphysical sense… the entire universe is stationed in Newcastle."[2] Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters inherits this laboratory, describing the narrator's task of encountering "Newcastle as a psychogeographic laboratory" and moving through ruins like the Jolly Roger pub "into the ontologically incomplete."[3]
Smith's neologism "(super)Novacastria" appears in Leaving/Leading within Pastoral Scanlines—Newcastle as a hyperdensified, almost mythic version of itself, every street corner resonating with meaning. The psychogeographic walk becomes a mode of thought, a way of reading the glitch: the city's perpetual disappearance mirrors Leif and Katita's cyclical return through the same disappearing streets.
See also
References
- ↑ A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (novel)
- ↑ Antinomicity (2022)
- ↑ Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters (2025)