The Eleventh Concordance, Clause VII

The Eleventh Concordance, Clause VII is the operative provision of the Eleventh Concordance concerning ambiguity of being in the built environment. Ratified in Year 45 of the Third Librarianate, it is the clause under which the Committee for Ontological Review was established and under which the Severance process is conducted. It is among the most frequently amended provisions in the Concordance cycle and, by the Librarianate's own count of Year 61, the most frequently mislaid: of the eleven certified copies held at the Spiral Registry on Floor 1,412, none was in its correct pigeonhole at any inspection between Year 48 and Year 55.

The clause's drafting purpose is narrow and has never been widened without dispute. It assigns to the Librarianate the duty of resolving cases in which a building, or a part of one, presents as more than one thing, or as no thing, and the ordinary catalogue cannot say which entry should be made to prevail.

Provisions and sub-clauses

Clause VII is not a single instrument but a small settlement of instruments, several of which are cited as if they were the whole. Clause VII.ii — formally VII.ii (Provisional) — governs administrative jurisdiction and is nominally active in both the Third Concordance and the Eleventh. That the sub-clause is evergreen while its parent is not has occasioned confusion since Year 46; the Committee of Parallel Truths raised the point in a memorandum of Year 49, observing that a provisional jurisdiction renewed without interruption for four concordances "has about it the character of a permanent arrangement wearing a temporary coat" (Committee of Parallel Truths, Memorandum 9, para. 4).

Clause VII. addresses conditions of irreconcilable ontological friction and permits what the text calls the striking of adjacency: where two entries cannot both be catalogued of the same landing, the landing itself may be struck from the adjacency register and reopened under a fresh designation at a later date.

"Where friction cannot be reconciled by inspection, the Inspector shall strike the adjacency and record the striking. Nothing in this clause requires the Inspector to explain the striking to the adjacencies struck."

— Eleventh Concordance, Clause VII.

Separately, Clause 7 of the Eleventh Concordance establishes the office of Clause 7 Inspectors for unnumbered hinges, a provision frequently bound into the same quires as Clause VII and mistaken for it. The two are unrelated. The Clarification of Year 52, issued under the Second Concordance, Addendum 3, Clause VII, records that the confusion has cost the Librarianate no fewer than nine wasted review sittings.

Investigation practice

Reviews proceed in two phases, investigation and determination, and the Eleventh Concordance requires only that the first be evidenced. Ersatz Adhesive, Type VII is the approved medium for stabilizing contested evidence during investigation; its specification allows use on brick, mortar, and painted plaster but not on vellum, which the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing protested in Year 50 on grounds of precedent. The protest was upheld, then reversed, then upheld again under the Clause VII, Addendum 3 of the Second Concordance, which provides the revision procedure for determinations made under Clause VII.

The practical difficulty is that Clause VII has never run in a single version. Its text circulated in three recensions during the Third Librarianate alone, and the differences are not merely clerical. The first recension reads that an ambiguous floor "shall be entered under the number it gives"; the third reads "the number it is given." The shift from dative of the floor's initiative to dative of the catalogue's was raised by Clause 17(vii) of the Third Concordance, which treats the earlier reading as governing for determinations made before Year 45 and the later for those after, without saying what is to be done with the boundary year itself.

Dispute: the jurisdictional question

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the clause's reach. One school, following Clause VII of the Third Concordance as read by the Eighteenth Concordance, Clause VII, holds that Clause VII is a clause of last resort: it may be invoked only where no earlier provision has determined the question, and any invocation that turns out to have been available under Eleventh Concordance, Clause 302 is void and must be reheard. The contrary school holds that the clause's first sentence — that the Librarianate "shall resolve ambiguities of being" — is dispositive, and that a duty to resolve cannot sensibly be made contingent on the resolution not having been attempted elsewhere.

The dispute is not academic. On Floor 2,206 in the winter of Year 54, a receiving hall presented as both a vestibule and a corridor, and while the question of jurisdictional priority was before two committees at once, a party of cataloguers crossed it eleven times in a morning. The hall was thereafter recorded as a vestibule and the corridor was entered as unheaded and attached, at the eleventh crossing, to the vestibule as a passage of convenience. No one has yet established under which provision that final entry was made. The Vellum Original of Clause VII bears a marginal note in a hand of the period reading only "not ours," which the Committee has declined to construe.

Amendment history

The clause has been amended fourteen times, most recently in Year 58 by the addition of a sentence requiring that any determination under VII.ii be read aloud in the chamber where it is made before the seal is affixed. Attendance at these readings is not open to persons carrying coat hooks, a restriction dating from the Year 47 incident on Floor 908 and retained without explanation in every subsequent recension. The Eleventh Clause archive holds the reading transcripts from Year 58 onward; earlier transcripts were destroyed in a damp.

Copies of the clause certified after Year 45 carry the seal of the Committee for Ontological Review on the recto of the final folio. A copy bearing the seal on the verso is not spurious — the Year 51 recension was printed both ways during a shortage of room — but should be referred to the Librarianate of the Recto before citation in any proceeding under Clause VII.