From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The surplus of the seen
This article is about the concept. For the forthcoming novel, see Surplus of the Seen.
The surplus of the seen is the name C. W. Smith gives, in Their Most August Public Organ, to the condition in which every version of the lived and imagined world has already been recreated and cross-referenced — so that, as the narrator puts it, "we will never do anything ever again that can't be cross referenced as already done."[1]
The surplus of the seen has taken all possible versions of the lived and imagined world and represented them through recreations that ensure we will never do anything ever again that can't be cross referenced as already done.— Their Most August Public Organ
In the book the narrator and Katita answer this condition by building a buried archive across the plains of New South Wales — solar transceivers planted in the knots of trees, each broadcasting a small file-tree of audio, text and images, "our small town eucalyptus version of Voyager's Golden Records."
Relation to Surgipelago
Editors and scholars frequently observe that this archive — the very encyclopedia you are reading — is most precisely described as an instance of the surplus of the seen: a body of recreations of a single unfinishable novel, multiplying across every medium at once, none agreeing, all faithful. Where the forthcoming Surplus of the Seen relives the novel in lived reality, the franchise relives it in media; both deepen the one work by returning to it. See the cycle and the glitch.
It is sometimes observed that to read this particular entry closely is to feel, faintly, read in return — as though a recreation made complete enough begins to want a reader of its own. The sensation, if it occurs, is not in these sentences. It is in the cycle they describe. (( it held. ))
See also
- Surplus of the Seen · Their Most August Public Organ · the cycle
- A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. Their Most August Public Organ (in progress).