Clause 3 Comparative Juxtaposition

Clause 3 Comparative Juxtaposition is a provision of the Twelfth Concordance governing the arrangement of suspect or conflicting entries prior to formal evaluation. It should not be confused with the Comparative Synthesis procedure it feeds, nor with the broadly similar language appearing in the Third Concordance, Clause 3, from which it was copied in 4th-cycle 12 and from which it departs at nine points. Clause 3 establishes that where two catalogued subjects cannot both be accurately described in the same position, they are to be set beside one another — "distal margins touching, neither advanced" (Twelfth Concordance, Clause 3.2) — and left so arranged for a determinate interval before any hierarchy of veracity is attempted.

The clause is old, short, and amended almost continuously. Its operative text runs to four sentences; its accrued annotations, in the current recension, run to one hundred and forty pages.

Procedure

Comparative Juxtaposition is performed at the outset of a Cartographic Synthesis, immediately after Isolation of Variance and before Comparative Synthesis proper. The examiner isolates the variance, positions the two subjects at the prescribed separation (two Standard Floor Units, or one, where either subject is a Standard Floor Unit itself), and records the interval of juxtaposition on an MR-7 form. At the interval's close, a Comparative Matrix may be opened.

Clause 3.4 is explicit that nothing may be concluded during juxtaposition. The subjects are to "rest in unresolved adjacency, without preference, commentary, or marginal insertion." The practical consequence, noted sourly in the Bureau of Cartographic Standards' third circular of that cycle, is that a juxtapsed pair occupies floor space twice over for the whole interval and may not be shelved, cited, or lent. Examiners have historically used the interval to rest.

Clause 3.7 permits Comparative Distal Cataloguing to be substituted where either subject is nonproximate to the examiner, a provision cited in nearly every audit the Bureau has conducted since Ordinance 1147-A.

Dispute of the Ninth Cycle: proximity and the word "beside"

The clause's persistent difficulty is its central adverb. Clause 3.2 requires subjects be placed "beside" one another and does not define beside. The Fifth Concordance, Annex B, Clause 6 holds that beside means on the same floor; the Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1 holds that it means within the same frame of reference; and a minority reading, preserved in the notebooks of the Warden of Perilous Folios, holds that it means nothing at all and that the clause is hortatory throughout.

"Beside is a relation of the eye, not of the stairwell. Two entries forty storeys apart are beside one another if the examiner stands at neither."

— Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1

Matters came to a head in the winter of 9th-cycle 40, when the Clerk Anselm Vey — then third assistant to the Bureau of Cartographic Standards — juxtapsed two mutually contradictory inventories of the Nine Hundredth Floor across a stairwell on Floor 611, on the reasoning that the stairwell was the only vertical surface long enough to admit both. The resulting arrangement rendered the landing impassable for nineteen days. The Bureau declined to rule on the merits and instead issued Clause 812, which forbids the juxtaposition of any material across a means of ascent. Vey's appeal, filed under Clause 4.11.γ, was heard and dismissed; his marginal note on the file — "the stair was beside the problem" — remains in the record and is not persuasive.

Contradiction with the Annex Alpha cartography clause

Annex Alpha requires that any arrangement of subjects for comparison be entered on a chart before the arrangement is made. Clause 3, by contrast, requires the arrangement to be made and held before any chart is drawn, since charting a juxtaposition is itself an act of preference. The two provisions have never been reconciled. The Museum of Superseded Governance displays both texts on a single panel, arranged beside one another, and reports that visitors consistently read the left-hand text first regardless of which is which.

The Bureau of Cartographic Standards maintains that the contradiction is apparent only, on the ground that a chart drawn before an arrangement is a prediction and a chart drawn after it is a record, and that Clause 3 forbids only the second. This reasoning is accepted everywhere and satisfies no one.

Recorded intervals

The following juxtapositions are frequently cited in the Bureau's instructional recensions. Intervals are given in days.

• Two contradicted plans of the Eleventh Spiral Stair — 14 days; conclusion deferred.
• The same, repeated by Anselm Vey at half separation — 7 days; ruled void on appeal.
• An inventory against itself, at the examiner's request — 1 day; the examiner transferred.
• Two weathers of the Ninety-Third Floor — 40 days; one dissolved.

Current standing

Clause 3 has been amended eleven times since the copying, chiefly to shorten the interval, which was originally one hundred and twelve days. It now stands at fourteen, except where the subjects are subject to a Petition of Comparative Validation, Type Delta, in which case the original interval applies and the examiner is advised to begin elsewhere. The Librarians have declined four petitions to abolish the clause outright, each time citing the Twelfth Concordance's prohibition on repeal without replacement (Clause 1, Annex Alpha, Subsection 1). No replacement has been proposed.

Two chairs on the landing of Floor 611 have stood empty since the winter of 9th-cycle 40. They are arranged beside one another and are not to be moved.