The Clerk Who Forgot His Purpose

The Clerk Who Forgot His Purpose is the informal designation, in near-universal use, for a class of personnel irregularity first recorded on Floor 88 and formally catalogued under the heading Deficiency, Purposive (Volitional). It denotes a clerk who retains rank, clearance, and the full privileges of his post while remaining unable to state what that post is for. The condition is distinguished from ordinary incompetence, which is documented on the floor itself, and from absence of purpose, which is a recognised category of ordination. The distinction was set out in the training of the Clerk-Arkivist Second Class ordinands, who are taught that the two are not the same grievance and are not remedied by the same form.

The Case of Floor 88

The first case of record is that of Clerk Osric Pennevar, posted to the enumeration galleries of Floor 88 in the winter of 6,702. Pennevar arrived, took his seat, conducted his duties for eleven days without complaint, and on the twelfth day asked the gallery warden to remind him what his duties were. The warden could not. The floor's own standing description had not been revised since the Definition of Floor 88 was struck, and the striking had removed the operative clause along with the contested one. Pennevar continued to be paid for two years and four months by the simple expedient of nobody stopping him.

The affair entered the literature through the scholar Kael, who argued that Floor 88's definition had conflated function with purpose — a confusion that only became visible once a clerk was asked to perform the function without possessing the purpose. Kael's reading is generally credited with the formal origins of The Purpose Debate, though the debate had been running informally for some centuries before it acquired a name.

Attestation and the Attestation Form

The condition is diagnosed, not confessed. An afflicted clerk does not report that he has lost his purpose; he reports that he has been unable to complete the attestation form, and the reviewing clerk notices that all the answers are blank in the same way. Under Fourth Concordance, Annex 7, a worker who cannot state his purpose is required to state the consequence of his purpose being absent. The distinction is procedural and, in the opinion of the Department of Epistemic Cartography, largely decorative.

"A clerk who cannot say what he is for may still say what would happen if he were not. This is the whole of the remedy available to him, and it is not enough."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 7, clause 2

The same annex records that the requirement was amended four times in the first year, each amendment removing the previous one; clerks who unwittingly cited a superseded clause are listed in the margin and are not held at fault. The form asks the clerk to state his purpose, the purpose of the clause, and the purpose of the question. The third line has never been filled in by anyone.

Whether the Clerk Remains a Clerk

There the matter divides. The Librarians hold, per Second Concordance, that a clerk is a clerk by appointment irrespective of what he says he does, following the older doctrine that office inheres in the seal. The contrary view, advanced in the Ninth Concordance and little used since, holds that a vestigial post is no post, and that a man who cannot say what he is for has been issued on loan and not appointed. The two clauses have never been reconciled; the Arbiter's office has declined to reconcile them, noting that both have been found operative in the same session.

Practical disputes tend to go to the Registrar of Negative Integers, who routinely reduces persons whose purposes have been recorded as absent to the status "present, purpose withheld." The Clerk of Ambulation has objected that this depopulates the registers while the walkers remain in the corridors, and that the forms do not specify an inspector. The Department of Epistemic Cartography replied that a form existed for the second objection and had been lost, which was regarded as an elegant answer.

Proceedings on the Stairs

Affected clerks are not generally removed. They are walked, in mild cases during a shift, and are walked by the Clerk of Ambulation who is responsible for the measurement. Clerk Ostrev Halden of Floor 331 was certified for a period and, on returning, submitted a requisition for Grade B Luminous Chalk counted at a rate that had never been authorised; he was never recalled to the Floor, and the requisition appears to have been simply filed. Records in the Sub-basement Scriptorium, held by Clerk Thelon, note that the simpler course is to keep the lost clerk working and correct the paperwork afterwards. The only difficulty is that in the cases where the clerk's purpose is lost, the paperwork cannot be corrected, because there is nothing to correct.

One visiting rule may be noted for the guidance of the floors: an afflicted clerk should not be confused with a clerk who is deliberately withholding his purpose. A withered purpose is not an absent one. Such a clerk will read this article and object to the phrasing if the confidence is right. The Concordance has fuller provisions on the matter and the Archivist advises that the relevant annex has been reversed since the copy in circulation.

Reversal

In a proportion of cases the purpose returns, most often in the course of an ordinary task — a clerk who is halfway through correcting a column and notices the missing title and fills it in. The final report of the Resin Practicals Lab describes the standard course for recovery as continuing to do the work and waiting. The complication is that the Tower's clerk takes some time to be sure the returned purpose is his own, and some little more whose reply to a summons may be a form of renewed purpose. The original reply, if the waiter's memory cannot be trusted, is still the party most worth pursuing.

The final practical instruction is recorded at Sixth Slate, clause 3: a purpose is not restored by the mere judgement that it has been found. The clerk who can but does not state it has an interval of grace, and a purpose of record has some hold on a clerk, but not one that survives losing the seal.