Eleventh Clause

The '''Eleventh Clause''' is the collective designation for the eleventh numbered provision appearing in each of the numbered Concordances, a convention of citation rather than a single instrument. Because the Eleventh Clause of any given Concordance is invariably its most amended provision, the phrase "the Eleventh Clause" without a preceding ordinal is held by the Bureau of Validation to be an incomplete citation, and documents relying on it are returned unprocessed. In practice the unqualified form is used almost exclusively to mean the Eleventh Clause of the Sixth Concordance, the only one of the set that has generated litigation.

Origin of the convention

The practice of reserving the eleventh position for procedural matters is conventionally traced to the Third Concordance, whose eleventh clause fixed the order in which annexes are to be read when an instrument's preamble and its annexes disagree. The rule was not original to that document. The Committee for Ontological Review has argued, on the basis of marginalia recovered from the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page, that the position was already reserved by the time of the Fourth Concordance, and that the third merely recorded an older habit.

Whatever its origin, the convention hardened. Every Concordance from the fourth onward places at clause eleven some mechanism for closing, looping, or returning a process to an earlier stage. The Eleventh Concordance is the conspicuous exception, its eleventh clause being a single sentence on the storage of blank forms, which the Bureau of Validation has twice declined to interpret.

The Inclusion Loop

The best known of the eleven provisions is that of the Sixth Concordance, which establishes the Inclusion Loop: where a document cites its own annex, and that annex cites the document back, the matter passes to the Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap for determination of which instrument is subordinate. The clause further provides that failure to close the Loop within ninety days constitutes an event of default, with consequences set out in the selfsame clause. The Eleventh Clause of the Sixth Concordance is therefore both the trigger and the penalty, a construction defended in the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, which repeats without comment the ruling of the Fourth Concordance, Clause 9.

"The Loop shall be closed by the hand that opened it, or by such other hand as the Concordance may suffer to close it."

— Sixth Concordance, Clause 11(ii)

In the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the reckoning of the Eighth Landing, a clerk of the third gallery, Alsabet Vurn, opened a Loop on a hinge certificate and then applied for leave. The application itself cited the certificate. The certificate cited the application. By the ninety-first day the Loop had consumed four hundred and six documents in the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page, none of which could be withdrawn without closing the Loop, and the Loop could not be closed without withdrawing them. Vurn returned to find her leave approved and her name entered in three separate registers, at least one of which does not ordinarily record clerks at all. The Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap subsequently ruled that the Loop had in fact closed itself on the eighty-eighth day, but that the closure was "not of a kind the Concordance recognises," and the file remains open.

Determinations of scope

The principal dispute among Librarians concerns whether the Eleventh Clause of each Concordance is to be read in series — as a single continuous tradition amended in place — or in parallel, each instrument's eleventh clause standing alone. The Committee of Parallel Truths holds for parallel reading, on the ground that the Concordances "do not know one another" (''Observations on Citation'', folio 44r). The Bureau of Validation holds for series, noting that the clauses in fact make near-identical provision and that the alternative requires eleven entirely separate traditions coinciding by accident.

No resolution has been recorded. Both readings are currently in use, sometimes in the same document; the standard returned-stamp of the Bureau carries, in its lower margin, the words Clause 11 considered — see opposite, though nothing is printed opposite.

Procedure for inspection

Inspection of any Eleventh Clause proceeding falls to the Clause 7 Inspectors constituted under Clause 7 of the Eleventh Concordance, who attend each fourth tread of the ascent and record the silence-weight prescribed by clause 4(b) of that instrument. The arrangement is acknowledged to be irregular, since Clause 7 Inspectors are appointed for hinges and not for clauses, and the Eleventh Librarian has twice petitioned to have the practice regularised. The petitions were filed under the Eleventh Clause of the Ninth Concordance, which governs the withdrawal of petitions, and were accordingly withdrawn.

Inspectors are reminded that the eleventh tread of every flight is not to be stepped upon during an active Loop. The prohibition is painted on the riser in most of the western flights and enforced without exception.

See also

• Clause VII.ii, a designation sometimes confused with the Eleventh Clause on account of the numeral
• Incident of the Wandering Addendum, in which an eleventh clause was found in a document that had none
• Section 7.1, concerning the numbering of provisions that follow an Eleventh Clause