Algernon-Haversham Thesis

The Algernon-Haversham Thesis is the designation given to a two-part proposition, first registered in 1929 and last amended in 1971, concerning the ontological standing of Shadows of Vanished Melodies. In its canonical form it holds (i) that such shadows are a second-order ontological byproduct rather than a primary phenomenon, and (ii) that they are paravibrational in character and cannot be reduced to simple wave interference. The two limbs are conventionally cited together and are, by the admission of the Thesis's own custodians, only weakly compatible. They are never cited apart, since Sixth Concordance, Annex 9, forbids the severance of conjoined theses "for the convenience of the citing party."

Origin and Registration

The Thesis was entered in the register of the Office of Doctrinal Registration on 14 Ventose, 1929, under seal of the Second Concordance, and was assigned the double name because its authors refused to settle the order of precedence. Haversham, who supplied the paravibrational limb, held that precedence should follow seniority of conception; Algernon — the compiler of Algernon’s Folio — held that it should follow seniority of publication. Neither would concede, and the Registrar resolved the deadlock by alphabetical accident. The arrangement was intended to be provisional. It has now stood for ninety-six years, and the Bureau of Nomenclature has twice declined to revisit it.

The Thesis did not emerge from nothing. Algernon’s Folio had already recorded, in the marginalia where the The Decoy Thesis was first set down, a series of queries about whether a phenomenon could be said to exist "in its own right or only in the wake of another." The 1929 Thesis takes up these queries and answers them in the affirmative on both counts, which is the source of its later difficulties.

The First Limb: Second-Order Byproduct

The first limb asserts that Shadows of Vanished Melodies have no independent existence. A shadow is held to be generated by the withdrawal of its melody, in the manner of a residue, and to possess only such standing as the residue of a registered event may possess. On this account the shadow is not a copy of the melody — a position the Inherency Thesis would reject outright — but the trace of the melody's departure. The distinction is preserved in the wording of the original instrument, which speaks of the shadow as "what remains when the sounding has been fully subtracted" (Office of Doctrinal Registration, Instrument 4,412, clause 3).

This limb is generally treated as settled. The Algernon Incompatibility Theorem, formalized by Vesper Algernon, was constructed expressly to preserve it, and Vesper Algernon presented that Theorem in the same Folio that carried her ancestor's earlier note. Later recensions of the Algernon's Theorem on Conceptual Plenitude have been read as implicating the first limb, though the Limitation of Algernon’s Theorem in Appeals limits the force of any such reading to disputes arising after 1948.

The Second Limb: The Paravibrational Claim

The second limb is the more contested. It holds that Shadows of Vanished Melodies are paravibrational: that they stand in some relation to vibration which is not itself vibration, and therefore that no account in terms of wave interference can be complete. The The Wave-Pattern Thesis, formalized in Algernon’s Folio (Amendment 12, 1904), had argued the contrary — that such phenomena are to be indexed as interference between discrete resonant states — and the 1929 Thesis is in large part a reply to it. The reply is courteous and does not name the Wave-Pattern Thesis directly, a reticence which has caused no end of trouble to later indexers.

The difficulty is that the second limb, if pressed, threatens the first. A phenomenon that is paravibrational is not obviously a residue of anything; it appears to have a mode of being of its own. Haversham addressed this in a supplementary note of 1931, now bound with the original instrument, arguing that a residue may be paravibrational "without thereby acquiring a biography." The note is eight lines long and has generated at least four hundred pages of commentary.

The Split of 1962

In the winter of 1962 the Office of Doctrinal Registration and the Office of Harmonic Records issued incompatible readings of the Thesis within a fortnight of each other. The Registration office held that the two limbs were sequential — byproduct first, paravibrational character second — and that the Thesis should be cited as a single proposition in two movements. The Harmonic Records office held that the limbs were simultaneous and that citing them in sequence falsified the instrument. Both readings were sealed. Neither office withdrew.

The matter was referred to the Concordance of Amended Readings, which declined to resolve it and instead amended the Thesis's preamble to state that it "may be read in either order, provided the reader does not proceed to consequences." A clerk of the Harmonic Records office, Marchetti Vane, appended a note to the file observing that this instruction had been complied with by no one since. Vane was reassigned to the Spiral Index the following spring.

"The Thesis is not a machine for producing conclusions. It is a place to stand while the melody is being subtracted."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex 12

Relation to the Decoy and Inherency Theses

The Thesis is routinely confused with The Decoy Thesis, from which it descends and from which it differs in a single respect: the Decoy Thesis concerns phenomena that present as one thing and are another, while the Algernon-Haversham Thesis concerns phenomena that present as nothing and are something. Indexers working the Lower Reading Rooms are instructed to keep the two apart by reference to the shadow's behaviour under subtraction. The instruction is printed on a card affixed to the wall of the second landing and is legible from the stairwell.

The Polian Thesis of Necessary Absolutes has been advanced as a corrective to the Thesis on at least three occasions, most recently in 1988, on the ground that a second-order byproduct presupposes a first-order product which the Thesis never names. The objection has not been answered. It has, however, been registered, and registration is what the Tower asks of an objection.

Current Standing

The Algernon-Haversham Thesis remains in force in both limbs. It is cited most often in disputes over the cataloguing of shadows recovered from the North Stairwell and in the periodic inventories of the Hall of Retired Melodies. Citation is permitted to any clerk holding a reading seal of the third grade or above. Clerks are reminded that the Thesis may be cited in either order but not, under any circumstances, abbreviated to the initials of its authors, a practice prohibited by Bureau of Nomenclature circular 77 since 1903 and still encountered on the fourth landing.