From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Cycle as Oral Form
This article examines Beach Surgery's glitch as a structural principle inherited from oral-narrative traditions.
An essay arguing that the glitch — the irreparable seam between Beach Surgery's two halves — should be read not as a narrative failure but as an inheritance from oral-epic tradition, where incompleteness is generative. Each retelling finishes the story differently because oral form privileges variation, responsiveness, and the listener's co-creation over textual fidelity.
The piece traces this principle across griot oral epics of West Africa (where the griot reimagines genealogy and heroic narrative each performance); Popol Vuh and other Mesoamerican cyclical texts (where creation and destruction repeat endlessly); and the ballad tradition in which dozens of regional variants of a single story coexist without a true version.
A core argument: the one-sided coin (the motif "there is one side to a coin, and it goes the whole way around") functions as a Möbius strip in narrative space. What appears to be two halves — Half One (Newcastle, city) and Half Two (the interior, desert) — is continuous; flipping the surface reveals they are one. Oral cultures naturally preserve and celebrate this ambiguity. Textuality (print, film, fixed script) demands separation and closure; orality allows perpetual cycling.
The essay further argues that C. W. Smith's emphasis on analogy ("the only way a thought can exist is when it mirrors itself against its equivalent") is itself an oral principle: narrative understanding through recursive comparison, not through linear plot.
Published work has been cited in theses on oral tradition and Beach Surgery, particularly in African and South Asian contexts. A 2025 symposium titled "Griotic Surgery" expanded this framework internationally.