On the Determination of Receipt

I.

The Schriftstellerstiftung established by Imperial resolution in 1897 maintained a fund out of which a modest pension was paid to the authors of literary works. To draw upon it an applicant deposited his work with the k.k. Office for the Determination of Literary Character, which entered the work in a register and certified, or declined to certify, that it was literature; the pension followed the certificate. The drafting commission had laboured some years over the question of what, for the purposes of the fund, ought to be held a literary work. It declined, in the end, to name any property of the text. It would not say that verse was literary and a railway timetable was not, having found, on examination, gentlemen prepared to defend the timetable and to disparage the verse, and being unwilling to legislate a quarrel it could not win. It fixed instead upon the single criterion to which the commission could give unanimous assent: that a literary work is a written text which has been received by a reader and has there accomplished its sense. This it considered the only honest measure of the thing, literature being, as one member observed and the others did not contradict, less a manner of writing than an event between persons. The commission rose well satisfied with its work.

II.

The difficulty appeared at once, in the first sitting of the office proper. To certify a work the office had to find that it had been received. The file before the examiner contained the work and the application. It did not contain the reception. Receipt had occurred, if it had occurred, elsewhere — in a room the office could not enter, in a head it could not open — and had left in the file no deposit but the deposit of the work itself, which was production and not receipt.

An examiner was appointed to read each submitted work. It was observed almost immediately that this did not answer, and a clarifying ordinance of the following year set out why. The examiner read in order to determine; he was not addressed by the text but set over it; and the posture of the man who weighs a thing is not the posture of the man to whom it is given. The reading of the examiner was examination, and examination was, by the express terms of the ordinance, not receipt. The office thus found itself able to produce, on demand and in quantity, exactly the one kind of reading the statute did not count. Every work that came before it was read, attentively, by a salaried official, and remained in law unread.

III.

An applicant might prove receipt by other means. He might lodge an affidavit from a reader — a sworn statement that the work had been read and had there accomplished its sense. Such affidavits were admitted, and they answered. An affidavit established, the moment it was sworn and lodged, precisely what it averred; the office took it as proof and certified upon it, and the pension was paid. There was no impediment in the procedure and the office worked it without difficulty.

What the procedure could not alter was the kind of thing it produced. An affidavit of receipt is a written record that a receipt occurred; and a record of a reading, as the office had already found of every record, is not the reading. To certify upon the affidavit was therefore to certify receipt upon the trace of receipt — to grant, on a sworn report that the event had taken place, what the statute had reserved for the event itself. The office did this, and did it lawfully, and called the result by the name the statute used. It was the nearest obtainable substitute, and the office was right to take it; only it was a substitute, standing where the thing had stood and bearing its name.

The affidavit had, besides, a second life. Being a written text deposited with the office, it passed in its turn into the register as a candidate work, whose own receipt the office was now obliged to determine, and would not, no one requiring it determined for the pension to be paid. Thus each certificate granted set down beside the work a further document — sworn, filed, undetermined — and the register grew not by any obstruction but by the plain operation of an office that bred a candidate from every instrument it touched. Nothing was blocked. The pile accumulated beneath a procedure that ran perfectly well.

IV.

A division opened in the Senate of the office and was never closed. The majority held that receipt, although it could not be exhibited, might be taken as proved — by affidavit where one was lodged, and failing that by presumption: from an edition printed and sold, from a binding worn at the corners, from the mere probability that amongst so many copies one had found a reader in the statutory sense. On this footing the majority certified, and the pensions were paid.

The minority would not have it. The dissent, entered by Hofrat Wittgenstein and never withdrawn, held that the affidavit and the worn binding were of one kind and shared one defect: both were records, and a received reading set down on paper is a record of a reading and not a reading, and loses in the writing the whole of what had made it the thing required. The substitute was not a slower or cheaper determination but a different act altogether, wearing the determination’s name. From this the dissent drew the only conclusion it thought consistent with the decree: that the office should make no finding; that the undeterminable files should be closed without certificate and shelved, and nothing said. The recommendation was that the office, in the matter for which it had been established, do nothing, and do it in silence. It was overruled. A fund cannot be administered by an office that declines to find; the pension must be granted or refused, and a refusal is a finding no less than a grant. Determinations continued to issue, over the dissent, which was itself written down, and deposited, and entered in the register, where it awaits the determination of its receipt.

V.

For the decree was general. All instruments of the office were to be deposited: its certificates, its registers, its findings. A certificate of literary character was a written text, and passed upon completion into the register as a candidate literary work, whose receipt the office was then obliged to determine. There lies in the cellars of the office a file, opened in its third year and never closed, upon the question whether the office’s first certificate is literature. It cannot be determined. The only reading the office can give it is the reading of the official set over it to decide, which is examination and not receipt; and so it waits, with the affidavits and the dissent and the works themselves, for a reader who comes to it not to determine anything but only to be addressed — the one visitor the office is not equipped to record, and would have no means of certifying should he come.

VI.

Nothing in the office was stuck. The examiners read, the affidavits were sworn, the certificates issued, the pensions were paid; the work went forward each day without arrears. The register grew, and grew the more briskly the better the office functioned, since every instrument it completed it deposited, and every deposit was a candidate it would not determine. It is the fullest catalogue in the Empire of works that have not, in the meaning of the statute, been read — not for want of attention, the examiners being conscientious and the filing exact, but in the precise and only sense in which the office is competent to speak, its competence consisting wholly in its capacity to produce, in place of the event it was founded to find, a faithful and accumulating record that the event had occurred. The clerks file. The pensions are paid upon the substitute, against the dissent. The dissent is deposited, and waits. Somewhere a corner of a binding wears; the office does not see it, and could not say what it meant if it did.