The Literalist Person

The Literalist Person is a class of inhabitant recognized in Tower census practice, denoting a resident whose name, occupation, and floor of record are held to correspond to one another without remainder. The class is administrative rather than descriptive: no Literalist Person has ever been asked to confirm the designation, and the Bureau of Names and Accommodations has ruled twice (Year 211, Year 244) that it should not be. It is not to be confused with the Literalist, a clerical title abolished under the Literalist Schism, nor with the Literalist Chapter, which certified other people's names and never its own.

Origin and the Standing Returns

The term first appears in the Standing Returns of the Ninth Ward, a survey begun in Year 96 and completed, in the sense that the surveyors stopped, in Year 103. The Returns were compiled to establish which floors were occupied, and the surveyors found themselves unable to record a resident without also recording what that resident did and where. A cobbler on Floor 314 was entered as a cobbler; a woman who kept bees was entered as a keeper of bees, though the Returns note that no bees were found in her possession or anywhere on the floor. The category was formalized by Concordance of Persons and Places, Annex 2, which fixed three registers — a register of names, a register of trades, and a register of floors — and provided that a resident whose entries in all three agreed could be marked with a small closed circle in the margin. The circle was chosen, according to the Annex's preamble, "because it has no opening through which a second meaning might enter." (Concordance of Persons and Places, Annex 2, preamble.)

Procedure of Attestation

Attestation is performed by a Certifying Reader of the Office of Standing Returns, who compares the three registers and records the result in a single line. The Reader may not consult the resident. The Reader may not consult the resident's neighbours, though in practice the Returning Reader of Floor 611 was reprimanded in Year 172 for having done so on eleven separate occasions across two winters. Cases judged literal are stamped with the closed circle and returned to the archive. Cases judged not literal are returned without a stamp and without comment, and are recorded in the Register of Unclosed Cases, which now runs to four hundred and six volumes. The Register's keepers maintain that most unclosed cases arise from trivial discrepancies — a trade recorded in one recension and dropped in the next — and that the Register's length should not be read as a judgment on the population.

Scholarly disagreement

The Concordance of Persons and Places holds that literal correspondence is a property to be discovered; the Third Concordance, Annex 4, holds that it is a property to be conferred, since the registers are the only evidence and the registers are kept by the Office.

"Let no Reader seek a person behind the entry. The entry is the person's whole account, and an account is not improved by looking under it."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 9

The Proceduralist School, which seceded from The Literalist School in Year 218, takes a third position: that the question is malformed, since the registers were never intended to agree and their agreement is an accident of clerical habit. The Chronological Purist School has declined to comment, on the grounds that the matter has not yet been dated. A further dispute concerns the status of persons whose names have been struck from one register and not others. The School of Literal Coherence maintains these are Literalist Persons of the second grade; the Master Index has declined to record them at all, and the omission has been noted in the Master Index under the heading "Persons of Unsettled Standing," which itself remains unsettled.

The case of Clerk Ondrey

The best-documented instance is that of Clerk Ondrey of Floor 88, whose name appeared in the register of names as Ondrey, in the register of trades as "clerk," and in the register of floors as 88. He was stamped in Year 129 and remained stamped for forty-one years. In Year 170 a resurvey established that Floor 88 had been renumbered 91 in Year 104, and that Ondrey's floor entry had been copied forward from a recension that predated the renumbering. The Office convened to determine whether his stamp should be withdrawn. It was not withdrawn. The Office held, by a majority of five to two, that Ondrey had been a Literalist Person at the time of stamping and that subsequent resurveys cannot unmake a past record. The two dissenting Readers observed that Ondrey had by then been dead for nine years, and that the question of his standing had therefore resolved itself. The dissent was entered in the Register and has never been answered. The Office's ruling is cited whenever a similar difficulty arises, which is roughly every third year.

Maintenance note and current practice

Stamps are kept in the third drawer of the Returning Room, Floor 41, and are not to be removed from the room, including for cleaning. The class remains small. The Office's most recent published count records nine hundred and twelve Literalist Persons in good standing, of whom three have petitioned to be removed from the class and been refused, the petition itself being entered as evidence of a second meaning. The Bureau of Names and Accommodations has ruled that petitions may not be entered in evidence for this reason, and its ruling has been entered in evidence four times.