From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Infinite Jest of Beach Surgery—Don DeLillo's Systems and Smith's Maximal Incompleteness
Cited in Surgical Incompleteness—Ontological Gaps in Global Medical Metaphors and the Narrative Structure of Adaptation. For Smith's maximalism, see Antinomicity.
This dissertation argues that C. W. Smith's A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight and its archive (Surgipelago) inherit the systems-based maximalism of Don DeLillo—the narrative practice of depicting systems (media, capital, surveillance, technology) so vast and interconnected that they exceed the novel's capacity to represent them—and then advances beyond DeLillo by making the glitch itself the constitutive principle of the system.
DeLillo's novels (especially Underworld, Zero K) thematize the impossibility of complete narrative: information saturates but never resolves; systems proliferate but never cohere. The novelist becomes a archivist of overflow. Smith inherits this method but radicalizes it: where DeLillo's systems might theoretically be mapped (if we had enough data), Smith's glitch is unmappable by definition. The novel is not a system that cannot be completed; it is a system whose incompleteness is its structure.
The dissertation traces this genealogy through three chapters: (1) DeLillo's media-saturated dread in White Noise and Smith's Antinomicity (the constant rebroadcasting, the palimpsest); (2) Pynchon's paranoia and Smith's Beach Surgery as the paranoia of narrative itself (what if the story cannot cohere?); (3) the global adaptations of Beach Surgery as 'franchise systems that refuse integration'—each adaptation is both a version and a contradiction, just as each system in DeLillo generates its own counter-system.
Concludes that Smith's work is post-DeLillian: it accepts maximalism and incompleteness not as tragic but as ontologically necessary.