Fractured Cantos

The Fractured Cantos are a cycle of twelve verse-recensions, of uncertain and disputed authorship, entered into the holdings of the Central Scriptorium between LY 404 and LY 419 and since reclassified no fewer than nine times. They are the principal literary instance of Fractured Provenance: no single canonical text of the Cantos exists, and every attempt to establish one has produced at least two further valid texts of equal archival standing. The Cantos are not to be confused with The Silent Cantos, which are notable precisely for containing no text at all, nor with the Litany of Adherence, whose 144 clauses are fixed and which the Cantos are frequently, and incorrectly, cited as supplementing.

Each Canto survives in a minimum of three witnesses held on separate floors, and no two witnesses agree beyond their opening line — "the stair was counted and the count was wrong" — which is common to all known copies and is the sole basis on which the cycle is treated as a single work.

Structure and contents

The twelve Cantos are numbered I through XII in the received order, though the Third Canto's colophon numbers it the Seventh, and the Seventh's colophon numbers it the Third, a discrepancy first recorded in the accession ledger of Floor 618 and never resolved. The admitted sequence proceeds as follows, with the subject of each Canto as stated in its own argument:

• I — the counting of the stair
• II — the third baldachin, which was not where it had been
• III — the auditor's objection
• IV–VI — lost; see the Gap below
• VII — the auditor's objection (second recension)
• VIII — the inventory of a room that held one chair
• IX–XI — the winter
• XII — a list of things not to be said aloud on the landing

Cantos IV, V and VI exist only as marginal notes in later hand, and are the subject of the longest-running disagreement in the commentary, below.

The Gap and the rival provenances

Two chains of custody purport to account for the missing Cantos, and both are archivally valid. The Spiral chain, held on floors in the Ξ series, asserts that IV–VI were withdrawn by The Order of the Fractured Nib in LY 407 and remain sealed under the Order's Chapter 11 privilege; the Annals chain asserts that the Cantos IV–VI were never written and that the numbers were reserved against a later hand which never arrived. The two chains have equivalent citational weight, and seven reconciliation attempts between LY 440 and LY 468 produced only six further sub-chains, four of them concerning Canto V alone.

The Principle of Fractured Reset Condition, as articulated in Annex Ω of the Second Concordance, Revision 7, is now the governing instrument for all disputes touching the cycle. It is applied with some frequency. In the winter of LY 452 a dispute over whether Canto IX preceded or followed Canto VIII required two hearings before the Curators of Living Paradox, sitting in the Spire of Fractured Certainty on Floor Ξ-77, who found that the question was itself a fractured provenance and closed the file on those grounds, at which point a third case was opened to consider the finding.

The Censures of Aris

The Cantos are inseparable from the disciplinary record of Scribe-Provisional Aris, who was censured in LY 451 for attempting to cross-reference the cycle with a First-Circle ontological framework during a Fourth-Circle Scribe Assumption. Aris's margin-work survives in the second witness of Canto VII and is intelligible only to readers holding the same Assumption, which cannot now be granted, the Fourth Circle having been closed to provisional scribes since the Crisis of the Fractured Lemma in AR 19,715.

A second censure was entered against Aris in the same year for annotating the Cantos in ink of a colour not registered with the Central Scriptorium. The colour is not recorded. Subsequent readers have noted the annotations without reproducing them.

Textual dispute: the count of twelve

The most persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether the cycle comprises twelve Cantos or thirteen. The Third Concordance, Annex 2, lists "the Twelve, and the one spoken of but not counted," which the commentary reads two ways. The reading favoured in the Ξ-series floors is that the thirteenth is the reading of the reader, and so is present in every recension and in none. The reading favoured in the Annals is that the thirteenth is Canto VI, and that the Gap is thus a miscount rather than a loss. A minority position, advanced in an unpaginated gloss on Floor 730, holds that the count is correct and the poems are wrong.

The Seventeenth Concordance has been cited in support of all three positions and settles none of them. The Office of Cyclical Review has declined to consolidate the commentary, noting in a minute of LY 466 that consolidation would constitute an amendment, and that amendments are not the business of that Office. The minute is signed.

"The Cantos admit of no settled reading. They are held in good order. These are not in conflict."

— Minute of the Office of Cyclical Review, LY 466

Access and handling

Witnesses of the Cantos may be consulted on request on their holding floors, one Canto per visit, and may not be carried between floors, a rule introduced after the second witness of Canto II was found to have contradicted the first. Readers are asked not to count the verses aloud on any landing above the ninth.