Documentary Realism

Documentary Realism is the operative philosophy of the Documentary Sourcing Division and the doctrinal foundation of the Documentary Audit, the Documentary Review, and the sealing of holdings in the Tower's lower scriptoria. In its short form, it holds that a catalogue entry is the object it describes, the physical artifact being a secondary manifestation. In its long form — the form taught to new clerks, and the only form the Division will now certify — it holds that an object's catalogued existence is defined by its measurable interactions with the Tower's physical matrix. The two clauses are recited together and have never been fully reconciled. The Division considers this a feature of the doctrine rather than a defect in it.

Origin and the Spiral 9 Disputation

Documentary Realism was enshrined as Tower doctrine as the direct settlement of the Spiral 9 Disputation, a fourteen-month argument over the western stair between the recorders of Spiral 9 and the auditors of the Division, which concerned whether a floor could be said to exist in a season during which no one had written about it. The recorders held that it could not. The auditors held that the question was malformed. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, resolved the matter by declaring the written record primary and the floor secondary, and by assessing the recorders' fees against the auditors on a split of nine to four. The chief recorder, Osia Vell, is recorded as having accepted the ruling "without reservation and without grace" (Spiral 9 Minute Book, f. 212). The doctrine as enshrined was later refined into Administrative Realism, which subsumed it while retaining its name on the spine of every copy still in circulation.

Doctrine of Documentary Humidity

The doctrine's principal measurable claim is that consistency in Documentary Humidity is a primary indicator of categorical stability. Humidity here is not water but the density of cross-citation in a holding's documentary neighbourhood: a subject cited consistently from many directions is held to be stable, and a subject cited inconsistently is held to be a candidate for reclassification, or for generation as a Documentary Phantom. The threshold is fixed at 41 per cent by the Standing Schedule of Inks and Readings; below it, a holding is "wet" and may not be lent. The instrument used to take the reading is the Vell hygrometer, a brass affair of uncertain calibration, of which the Division maintains four and trusts two.

Critics within the School of Instrumental Realism have argued for sixty years that the 41 per cent threshold was chosen to fit the readings of the Vell instrument rather than the other way round, and that the doctrine proves only that well-cited things are well cited. The Division's standing reply, reproduced on every hygrometry form since 1141, is that this is precisely what the doctrine claims, and that the objection is therefore a restatement.

The Yarrow Find and the lost original

That the inscription is the act itself, even when the original document is lost, altered, or disputed, was established in practice by the Yarrow Find of the winter of 1183 — a sealed crate on Floor 604 containing eleven catalogue cards and no objects. Clerk-Adjutant Yarrow argued that the cards constituted the objects, and that the objects had merely failed to arrive. The Division agreed, catalogued the eleven subjects on the strength of the cards, and has since issued two hundred and six supplementary cards for the crate, which remains in storage and is opened once a decade for readings. The eleven subjects have accrued their own holdings, their own disputes, and one hereditary feud between two copying houses. None of the objects has ever been observed, which the doctrine treats as neither here nor there.

"The card is not a description of the thing. The card is the thing, and the thing, where it appears, is the description."

— Twelfth Concordance, Annex 2

Dispute with the Contained school

The doctrine's sharpest ongoing quarrel is with Contained Realism, which holds that a subject is real only to the extent that the Tower contains it, and which therefore treats lost originals as lost subjects. The two positions are irreconcilable in principle and are in practice distinguished by which forms a clerk fills in first. The Fourteenth Concordance sides with Documentary Realism; the Fifteenth Concordance, drafted eleven years later by a committee that included three Contained Realists, sides with the other. The Division cites the Fourteenth and has petitioned the Librarians for a ruling on the Fifteenth since 1209. The petition is in good order and has been in good order for a long time.

A related dispute concerns Documentary Dissonance Practice, whose practitioners deliberately introduce conflicting citations in order to observe a holding's response. Documentary Realists regard this as a form of tampering. Dissonance practitioners regard the Realists' objection as evidence that the doctrine is fragile, which the Realists regard as evidence that it is being tested, and so the argument proceeds.

Practice and prohibitions

The doctrine's daily consequence is the Documentary Audit, which traces an entity's "documentary metabolism" — the rate at which citations accumulate and decay around it — and issues a stability certificate where the metabolism is judged sound. Documentary Columns are read under the same principle: the column's inscription is the act, whether or not the act occurred. The Division maintains a small annex to Floor 88 where certificates are struck and where, by long custom, the hygrometers are not to be left in direct sunlight, nor oiled on the same day as they are read. Both rules are posted by the door.

Since the doctrine's consolidation under Administrative Realism, the Documentary Sourcing Division has ceased to describe itself as a school. It describes itself as a records office, which it has always been, and which, under Documentary Realism, is the same thing.