Hermeneutic Cartography

Hermeneutic Cartography is the practice of mapping a floor by the meanings its visitors take from it rather than by its walls. It is the oldest surviving sub-discipline of the cartographic arts, and the only one whose instruments are not permitted to touch the subject. A hermeneutic map of a corridor does not show where the corridor is; it shows what the corridor was understood to be by the persons who walked it, in the order they understood it, with the points of divergence marked in red.

The practice is recognised under Annex 7.2.C of the Meta-Concordance, which grants it standing to adjudicate disputes arising from readings of the map, though not from the floor.

Method

The cartographer works from testimony. A walker is sent through a space and asked, at each turn, what the space has meant to them so far. Their answers are entered on a blank sheet in a hand that is not allowed to be the cartographer's own; the sheet is then measured, the measurements entered in a second hand, and the result compared against the readings of every earlier walker of the same space. Where two walkers agree, the path is drawn in black. Where they diverge, the divergence is drawn as a second path and both are kept. No hermeneutic map has ever been reduced to a single correct reading, and the Librarians have declined, in four successive opinions, to say that this is a defect.

The instrumentarium is small: a blank sheet, a ruled frame graduated in what the manual calls degrees of evident meaning, a pair of dividers the cartographer is forbidden to close, and a seal. The dividers must remain open throughout. In the winter of the year that the annexes were renumbered, a cartographer at the Third Gallery is recorded as having closed them in frustration; the resulting sheet was remitted to the Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration, which found it to be a map of the cartographer and not of the floor, and bound it into the register as an example.

Relation to the other cartographies

Hermeneutic Cartography is not an administrative sub-office but a method, and this has caused it to be claimed by several bodies at once. The Department of Cartography holds it to be an ancestor discipline rather than a division, and has twice declined to allot it a budget on that ground. The Bureau of Latent Cartography claims it as a parent on the authority of a line in its founding instrument reading "and the manifest after the manner of the readers thereof"; the Bureau of Contradictory Cartography disputes the reading and has published a note asserting that the line refers to something else entirely, though the note does not say what. The Department of Noetic Cartography has lodged the strongest claim, on the ground that a map of meanings is a map of the mind; its petition of 11 March, submitted with four hundred and six sheets of evidence, was accepted for filing and has not been decided.

The relation to Spiral Cartography is settled but poorly understood. The Department of Cartography holds, in a standing instruction, that Hermeneutic Cartography is subordinate to Spiral Cartography in matters of ultimate adjudication but not in matters of procedure — a distinction that has generated more appeals than any other in the cartographic corpus. Empirical Cartography takes the contrary view of the same clause and continues to cite hermeneutic sheets as evidence, which the Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration has ruled impermissible without ever enforcing the ruling.

The two Concordances

The central scholarly disagreement concerns what a hermeneutic map is of. Third Concordance, Annex 6, provides that "a map of readings shall be admitted as a map of the place, the readings being taken as the place's own speech" (Third Concordance, Annex 6, cl. 3). The Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, provides with equal firmness that "no reading is the place, and a map that confounds them shall be stamped testamentary only" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, cl. 9). Both clauses remain in force. Under the second, every hermeneutic map produced since the Fourth Concordance must bear the testamentary stamp in the lower left margin, and most do; under the first, those same maps are admissible as surveys of the floor, and are used as such by anyone who needs them to be.

The Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration has issued three Precedence Edicts on the question and has declined to consolidate them. Its Edict on the Testimentary Margin observes only that a map may be both, "in the manner of a witness who is also a resident" (Edict on the Testimentary Margin, cl. 1), which has been treated as authority by both sides since its issue.

Known limitations

Hermeneutic mapping proceeds slowly, and its sheets are held to be unreliable in proportion to the number of readers of a given floor. A corridor read by one person yields a map of one line. A corridor read by forty yields a map no one can follow. The practice therefore finds most use on floors that are nearly empty, and its principal surviving works are of the disused landings, the shut annexes, and the corridor behind the Hermeneutic Stairwell, which recalibrates its steps according to the visitor's intent and has consequently never been mapped to anyone's satisfaction. The Stairwell charters of three expeditions record an identical finding in identical words — that the stair "was of the number the walker required and no other" (Charter of the Second Ascent, fol. 14) — and the Office has ruled that this is not a divergence, since all three walkers required the same number.

Loose sheets must not be carried up the Hermeneutic Stairwell. The margin of the folder should be initialled in the lower left corner, not the upper.