Iconoclasts of the Pure Page

The Iconoclasts of the Pure Page are a reformist reading order of the middle stacks, first recorded on Floor 2,214 in the winter of the year the archive numbers as 3,088, and constituted as a body under a marginal annotation to Concordance 9.β that was never formally entered in the register. Their distinguishing tenet is not the destruction of images — a common misreading, corrected in their own Short Apology of 3,091 — but the removal of every ornament that stands between a reader and the page's plain sense. An Iconoclast holds that a page is pure when nothing on it points away from itself. What they do to a decorated capital is not violence. It is restoration, conducted slowly and with witnesses.

Origins on Floor 2,214

The order formed around a copyist named Hesta Vane, then employed in the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page as a corrector of second proofs. Vane's grievance is recorded in a memorandum of the 14th of Frost, 3,088, addressed to the Scriptorium's Under-Secretary and returned to her unopened on the ground that it concerned a matter already settled by Concordance 4.γ. The memorandum is four lines long. Its substance was that the interleaved proofs of a liturgical psalter had acquired, through successive corrections, eleven layers of marginal gloss, and that the psalter itself could no longer be located beneath them. Vane requested permission to remove the gloss. Permission was refused. She removed it anyway, and the resulting volume — now held as Vane's First Pure, Floor 2,214, shelf 9 — is the founding object of the order.

By the spring of 3,089 the Iconoclasts numbered, by their own count, forty-one, and by the count of the Clerks of the Fixed Page, nine. The discrepancy has never been resolved, and both figures continue to be cited in the order's favour.

Tenets and the Question of the Ornament

The Iconoclasts distinguish between an illustration, which they permit, and an ornament, which they do not. An illustration shows something the text already says. An ornament shows something the text does not say and was not asked to say, and its presence is held to be a small falsehood committed against the reader's attention. The distinction is set out at length in the order's Apology, and it is the point at which their doctrine most often fails in practice:

"We do not hate the vine that climbs the margin. We ask only what it is doing there, and by whose warrant, and whether the reader who follows it will return."

— Hesta Vane, Short Apology for the Pure Page, §12

In 3,094 the order was asked to adjudicate a dispute over the Antechamber of Pure Form, whose doors carry a frieze of interlocking apertures. The Iconoclasts found the frieze ornamental and recommended its removal. The Guild of Pure Measurement, which consults with the Antechamber and had measured the frieze at intervals of one hand's breadth, found it structural and objected. The matter reached the Custodians of Pure Fact, who declined to inscribe either finding, observing that the frieze had been measured but not adjudicated, and that they were not in the business of adjudicating measurements. The frieze remains. It is now covered during Iconoclast visitations, a practice the order calls the plain viewing.

The Dispute with the Scriptorium

Relations with the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page are governed by the awkward fact that the Scriptorium archives all materials relating to the Clean Page Doctrine, and the Iconoclasts regard themselves as that doctrine's most faithful exponents. They argue that a page stripped of ornament is the Clean Page made visible before its time, and that their removals are therefore preparatory rather than destructive. The Scriptorium has never accepted this. Its position, restated at every recension since 3,092, is that the Clean Page is a state to be attained through the warrant of enduring non-contradiction, and cannot be arrived at by scraping.

Matters were not improved by the affair of the aerostatic lamp. In the winter of 3,096 an Iconoclast party on Floor 2,301 turned the diagnostic lamps of an Aerostatic Page-Turning System onto a suspected Unwritten Page, hoping the watermark would confirm that the page was pure beneath its decoration. The watermark appeared, as watermarks do, but the lamps were turned for nine hours without relief and the system's suspension failed. The party was charged with misuse of an instrument belonging to another guild, and the resulting fine — eleven measures of lamp-oil, payable to the Guild of Pure Procedure — is still outstanding. The order maintains that the lamps revealed what they were built to reveal and that the failure was mechanical.

Relations with Adjacent Bodies

The Iconoclasts are frequently confused with the Adherents of the Persistent Page, who also concern themselves with what a page retains, and the confusion is resented on both sides. The Adherents hold that nothing on a page may be removed because the page persists in all its states at once. The Iconoclasts hold that this is precisely the problem. A joint reading on Floor 2,244 in 3,099 ended after twenty minutes, and the transcript consists largely of the two moderators agreeing that the terms of the debate had not been settled.

With the Sect of the Thirsty Page the order maintains a formal silence. With the School of the Unmarked Page it maintains a correspondence, conducted quarterly, in which each side describes the page it prefers and neither claims the other's is impossible. The Kinetic Page-Turner is permitted at Iconoclast readings, provided it is stopped between pages. The Blank Page Presentation is not.

Objections and the Contradiction of the Concordances

The order's standing rests on a genuine contradiction between two instruments. Concordance 9.β carries, in its marginal annotation, the phrase the page purged of its occasions, which the Iconoclasts read as their charter. Concordance 4.γ, however, settles the matter of glosses by forbidding their removal once entered, and its annexes make no exception for glosses that obscure the text beneath. The Custodians of Pure Fact have been asked four times to resolve the conflict and have four times declined, on the ground that a fact must be stated before it can be amended, reaffirmed, or consecrated, and that neither Concordance states a fact.

A minority of Iconoclast scholars, led since 3,101 by the reader Orrin Sable, argues that the two instruments do not conflict at all: that 4.γ concerns the glosses of others and 9.β the glosses of one's own hand, and that Vane's removals were lawful because she had written half the glosses herself. This reading is elegant, is accepted by no other body in the Tower, and has done much to keep the question open.

Visitors to the order's reading room on Floor 2,214 are asked to leave decorated bindings at the door. The Iconoclasts provide a plain wrapper. It is not returned.