Narrative Anomalies Orientation

When Art meets Containment

Orientation to narrative anomalies and their management by the Foundation

I fought Don Quixote for two years. This is something that makes the eyes of neophytes shine.

He was responsible for one of the first major anomalous metanarrative crises that the Foundation had to manage, and this only in 2007. It was on SCP-4028 that I worked my way up in the department. Finally, all this to say that Don Quixote has taught me an essential lesson for my work. That's a funny phrase, isn't it? You'll understand why I love my job.

I will surely spoil the reading of the document for those who have not read it — yes, I sometimes read reports like one reads a novel — but we have never managed to confine Don Quixote. For almost three years we fought to cover the damage, to the point where I no longer accepted the new containment proposals, waiting for my notice of dismissal, resigned and tired.

Until the day SCP-4028 neutralized itself. Its story simply ended, somehow. This important lesson that I have kept as a mantra is that the anomalies in my charge are narrations. They obey precise codes, within the reach of any literary student, and it is on this reflection that I have developed my containment procedures during my career.

Here, I will talk about narrative anomalies exclusively, and we will ignore several concepts such as those developed by Dr. Swann in 1991, or the research work carried out by the Director Panagiotopolous, since this is not the topic. We will talk a little about my department and the methods it has developed to confine narrative anomalies. Believe me, there will be surprises, and you will have a more complete view of our methods and the types of anomalies concerned.

— Dr. Pierre Menard, Research Director, Pataphysics Department (Francophone Referent)

Origin of Narrative Anomalies
- Definition
- Narration and You: Birth of the Noosphere
- The Cliché and/is the Standard
Types of Narrative Anomalies
- Anomalies of Narration and Narrative Anomalies: a brief history and nuances
- Narrative Style Anomalies: Queneau Class
- Conscious Narrative Anomalies : Cervantes Class
- Reality Bending Narrative Anomalies: Navidson Class
Containment methods and strategies
- First Contact and Recovery
- Queneau Class: A Book without Reader is a Dead Book
- Cervantes Class: Stylistic Incarcerations
- Navidson Class: Final Cut
Special cases
- Hazred Class: Narration as Passage
- Narrative Thaumiels
- The Language Bureau: What about Translation?
Conclusion: The Story Goes On

Definition

Briefly, what is a narrative anomaly? It's all in the name: it's an anomaly that has the particularity of manifesting itself through a narration. Very generally, we have a very precise image of what a narrative anomaly is: a book, or a fictional character, that comes to make a mess in other books, and sometimes the Foundation's documentation, which makes them unpredictable and dangerous anomalies. This image of narrative anomalies is accurate but very pejorative and limited, and for good reason: it is the most common and selling example.

In truth, the majority of narrative anomalies present themselves to us in this form. We'll explore this in the Types of Narrative Anomalies tab of this dossier, but here you'll understand why this is the case, and how these anomalies arise. In short, we can use the definition I gave in 2013 in my book Narremes and memes: the rise of the anomalous clichés:

A narrative anomaly refers quite simply to a narrative element, whatever it may be, acquiring anomalous properties. The latter are manifested almost exclusively by a willingness to interact with other narrative elements or even with our world.

Narration and You: Birth of the Noosphere

As you will have understood, for there to be a narrative anomaly, there has to be a narration. And there is no narration without conscious beings capable of imagining it. So yes: narrative anomalies are born partly from the mania that humanity has taken to tell stories to each other. And how did this happen? The answer lies in that word as mysterious as it is ridiculous: the noosphere.

It is important to note that the noosphere is not the result of any abnormal research. It is a concept invented by the mineralogist Vladimir Ivanovitch Vernadski, who not content with having already considerably developed the notion of biosphere, followed this neologism substituting noos, thought and spirit, for the bios of life. More specifically, the noosphere is the fifth layer in interaction with others that envelops our planet, alongside the lithosphere, the biosphere, the atmosphere and the technosphere. It was the philosopher and theologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who came to rework the noosphere in his 1955 posthumous work The Phenomenon of Man. So what far-fetched theory could have emerged from the work of an eminent mineralogist and a priest-researcher-paleontologist?

The noosphere is literally defined as the sphere of human thought. It is an additional phase of planetary development, following on from the geosphere and the biosphere. De Chardin spoke of a veritable "thinking layer" that encompassed our planet. The term has been difficult to define correctly, but quite often we speak of the collective intelligence of humanity, which manifests itself as much in the conceptualisation of shared values and ideas as in the construction of organisational infrastructures and institutions.

The noosphere has often been associated with the field of study of memetics as defined by Richard Dawkins. It is important to remember that we deal with memetic hazards at the Foundation, and it is best that you forget this idea right away: that is not what we are talking about here. To sum up, Dawkins memetics refers to the study of the transmission and evolution of cultural elements according to a Dawkinian approach, as one would study the evolution of the living organisms. The noosphere thus designates all the cultural, cognitive and emotional human fields, grouped together in an immense metaphysical web.

For those who know the Oneiroi Collective, you can imagine more or less the same thing, without consciousness and full of cultural codes and concepts, a bit like a large dematerialized library.

To conclude, the noosphere is at the origin of the vast majority of narrative anomalies. These anomalies are born and nourished by the crystallization of human thought, the artistic spirit, and creative concepts that transit through the noosphere. I have told you this in a rather poetic way, but the technical details are not much different.

The Cliché and/is the Standard

It is rather childish to understand the ins and outs of narrative anomalies in the end. These are based on two main pivots: Tropes and Creativity.

The tropes, you know them, even without knowing it. Do you know what clichés are? Well, clichés are tropes, threadbare. They are narrative conventions, tendencies that can be found in fiction. A trope can be an archetype of character, a catchphrase, a situation, a narrative genre and so on. The important thing to remember is that tropes are recurrent: they are structures that bring meaning and provoke things, that intertwine and clash to structure a story. In other words, they are common creative concepts that are anchored in the noosphere.

The origin of the emergence of a narrative anomaly is very difficult to determine, but its emergence alone is rather simple to describe. At a given moment, a particular piece of work, often linked to a very common trope or even a cliché and therefore particularly well anchored in the noosphere, will develop anomalous attributes. We will come back to the forms that these attributes can take in Types of Narrative Anomalies shortly afterward, but what is important to remember is that these anomalies are subject to strict and known narrative codes.

I will give you the example of the one who is nicknamed the "Pierre Bourdieu of Fictions", Professor Sacha Ainley. Professor Ainley has worked a lot on conscious anomalies during her career, so much so that within the department, researchers who dragged out interview reports were referred to as "Sacha and Fred".

Professor Ainley, then, said that where individuals are conditioned by their socialisation, that is, the process of integrating norms and values into their relatives, their workplaces and society in general, conscious narrative entities are conditioned in their behaviour only by the narrative processes related to their work of reference. Their personality and behaviour will rarely exceed the one described from the prologue to the epilogue, and reasoning a narrative entity about its behaviour is not easy. It is often possible for them to learn, but it must be taken into account that their entire personality and beliefs are rooted in what the narrative wants to tell us, and failing that, what the majority of readers think they know about them.

Remember, therefore, that narrative anomalies obey narrative codes that are accessible to almost everyone, and that their capacities are based on the most diverse figures of speech, nestled in the most twisted narratives and expressed through the most clichéd characters.

Anomalies of Narration and Narrative Anomalies: a brief history and nuances

It is useful to come back to an abuse of language: when we talk about narrative anomalies, we generally imply that they are anomalies related to writing. In practice, this is the case, however, narrative anomalies actually concern any type of narration. They can be cinema, theater, dance, painting, music, singing, drawing, and so on. Although the Pataphysics Department does not collaborate directly with other departments, I have had the opportunity to train with the History Department and its Art History Division, as well as with several experts in anart.

The first narrative anomalies thus date back to the frescoes of Lascaux, reproduced many times in paranormal forms in order to preserve the secret of their abnormal nature. Some amateurs had begun to detect their extremely slow movement through repeated visits. And, let's not hide the fact, the parapaleontologists of the Foundation were concerned for the condition of these precious and fragile paintings. Subsequently, it is certain ancient narrative structures such as the dramatic papyrus of the Rameséum will be discovered again. The latter is a set of "notebooks" of ancient processions, considered to be the traces of a proto-theater, and which proved to be an anomaly with a compulsive effect. The people affected by the text irresistibly reproduced the notes and the text learned, corrected, and completed itself according to the results.

There's a whole area of Abnormal Narrative History to be studied, but that's where our jurisdiction ends. The Pataphysics Department only handles literary work: there are experts in anart for the rest. Abnormal art is a vast subject and abnormal literature is a special case. There has already been talk of making the Department of Pataphysics a branch of the Department of Art History. Officially, the missions of the Pataphysics Department go beyond the simple field of "artistic confinement"¹ Unofficially, this would be a monstrous administrative mess, the Department of Art History being already a branch of the Historical Department.

We will therefore focus mainly on literary narrative anomalies here, whether our other artist friends like it or not. But of course, this will not prevent me from giving you examples from other artistic branches, but please understand that the line between simple artistic anomaly and narrative artistic anomaly is sometimes tenuous (not all anart is narrative). Whereas when it comes to literature, the issue is more quickly and easily resolved.

Narrative Style Anomalies: Queneau Class

These are the simplest narrative anomalies: those that alter the narrative. Rather generally infectious, they will transform other narrative media to suit their style or even something else altogether. Queneau Class anomalies tend to be found very often in other art forms, more so than the Cervantes and Navidson Classes in general. Queneau Class anomalies can affect other media by altering their genre or style in a wide variety of ways.

Their modus operandi stops at the simple modification of other media written according to their criteria so that they can be compared to narrative viruses. We often talk about the modification of the work in contact with the anomaly, but in reality, it makes little sense. It is necessary to differentiate between the anomaly itself, which is located in the noosphere, and the paper or electronic medium that is its vector. During the 2007 metanarrative crisis caused by SCP-4028, the Foundation had put its best computer scientists on the spot, in vain: they had not yet understood at the time that narrative anomalies shared only a vague resemblance in behavior with abnormal computer viruses (still very present with the rise of the Internet at the time).

In truth, stemming a metanarrative crisis is more the domain of an oneiroic² that of a computer specialist. The transmission from one narrative to another is done through the noosphere, and thus follows a logic of narrative and stylistic proximity. It is when this scheme is not respected that a Cervantes Class anomaly is suspected.

Examples of Queneau Class Anomalies :

SCP-1893 - The Minotaur's Tale
SCP-3055 - Yes, And
SCP-4098 - S-C-P, easy as 19-3-16 !
SCP-119-FR - The Bizarre SCP-119-FR Overnight Incident

Conscious Narrative Anomalies: Cervantes Class

The Cervantes Class designates conscious narrative anomalies. It is rather difficult to differentiate Cervantes anomalies from Queneau anomalies since these two categories of abnormal phenomena often have the same modus operandi. The difference was established once again by Professor Ainley. A conscious narrative anomaly very often acts according to a moral point of view and the convictions conferred upon it by the author of the original work, where a Queneau Class anomaly will act in a purely stylistic way.

Ainley said that a contrario (although more rarely) a Cervantes tries to escape their condition, to educate themselves, and to emancipate themselves from the original work. However, it is strictly impossible for a conscious narrative to learn anything, as he demonstrated. The choices that a conscious narrative entity makes, even when it involves a radical change in behavior linked to some kind of awareness, are often determined by the way the author has conceived his character. The evolution of a Cervantes' behavior will inevitably end up stagnating.

There is a real debate here: some researchers question the Cervantes' consciousness, arguing that the Cervantes are nothing more than a very elaborate set of narrative constructions and character development, pre-programmed like a machine. Yes, the debate on artificial intelligence also applies to narrative entities, and the task is certainly not simplified by the level of complexity reached by the debate in the spheres of the abnormal.³

Cervantes Class Anomalies are very often characters, even more often main characters. Narrators can also be Cervantes Class, but quite often they will be found in the Navidson category. The psychology of conscious narrative abnormalities is a fascinating field, and these factors must of course be taken into account in containment. A long time ago, it was possible to use certain methods which we will discuss later, but which ended up pricking the Ethics Committee when the debate on the consciousness of Cervantes Class Anomalies became too heated.

It is assumed that beyond the paper, the author's deepest intentions are taken into account when creating a Cervantes, although in general the writer explicitly and implicitly describes everything there is to know about his character. However, in the same way, that one must differentiate between the narrative anomaly and its medium of expression, it is certain that the noosphere can make the difference between the author and his words. As far as readers are concerned, well… The question is more complicated.

The more common a fiction is, the less likely it is to develop the abilities of a Cervantes. This strange paradox has long been misunderstood, a common fiction having normally acquired a more powerful anchorage in the noosphere. It was finally a cross-study between Prof. Ainley and Prof. Alison Carter of the Department of Art History that finally made it possible to account for the reasons for this phenomenon. It is not so much the strength of the concept in the noosphere as the number of attentive readers that matters. Indeed, SCP-4028 possessed this first attribute but certainly did not have the same proportion of readers as a Harry Potter or a Katniss Everdeen.

The problem with having a lot of readers is that more interpretations come out of it. Pr Ainley and Carter concluded that for the formation of a Cervantes, it was necessary for the crystallization of interpretations to take place around a common Canon, free of all debate and fanfare that would parasitize the noosphere. This is why the majority of the Cervantes Class anomalies forming on the basis of known characters were written in older periods. It is a bit as if the mass of readers formed a cacophony, and that over time the cacophony faded, organized and crystallized around the vision of the original author, which explains why the majority of narrative anomalies arising from ancient popular fiction have only manifested themselves relatively recently.

Examples of Cervantes Class Anomalies :

SCP-085 - Hand-drawn "Cassy"
SCP-423 - Self-Inserting Character
SCP-2786 - The Archetype
SCP-3043 - Murphy Law in…the Foundation Always Rings Twice!
SCP-4028 - La Historia de Don Quixote de La Mancha
SCP-484-FR - Billy the Euclid

Reality Bending Narratives: Navidson Class

Navidson Class narrative anomalies are extremely dangerous. They can be a powerful narrative entity or a despotic deity like a silly typewriter that has been a little overzealous. A Navidson is capable of bending a portion of reality in order to turn it into fiction. This type of phenomenon is still far too misunderstood today and is responsible for great damage. A researcher from the Pataphysics Department once compared it to a degradation of the noosphere, "as if one suddenly decided to wipe out part of the world's conceptual biosphere".

If you face a Navidson, you are trapped until the story ends. You are trapped in a molasses of codes and tropes that forces your actions and crushes your free will. And pray that the end is not final. This has already happened with several books kept under the Fahrenheit-451 Protocol in the Department's premises, but we'll come back to this when we talk about containment strategies.

Don't panic though, there is a type of Navidson with lower risks, which is often closer to a reality-folding Queneau. The effect of this type of Navidson is often permanent and targeted to a certain area when it is a physical abnormality, or to a portion of the language. These anomalies will allow certain tropes to be realized by manipulating the probability field. One of the best-known examples of these particular cases of Navidson is related to Nexus-18, a small town in Wisconsin where certain phrases are banned in order not to trigger stupid accidents and where local folklore regularly takes physical form. The research into narrative anomalies there is quite astonishing (I recommend that staff with the necessary credentials look into the research of Isaiah Howard Pickman, supported by the staff at Site-87).

It should be noted that the more the level of interaction between the audience and the narration is allowed, the more often one will tend to find Navidson-type anomalies: the proportion of books in which you are the hero, role-playing games, and other abnormal video games has exploded in recent years, notably due to videogame companies such as Arcadia or creations by Gamers Against Weed. Some artistic circles have also offered us some of Navidson's high-potential plays.

Examples of Navidson Class Anormalies :

SCP-3309 - Where We Go When We Fade, Fade Away
SCP-3043 - Murphy Law in… Dial 3043… FOR MURDER!
SCP-3138 - A Sepulcher by the Sea
SCP-4040 - At The Bottom Of A Bottomless Pit

First Contact and Recovery

Directly infiltrating the noosphere has long been an objective pursued by the Pataphysics Department, with varying degrees of success. During the early stages of our experiments, we did almost as much damage to the biosphere as a nice big industrial revolution would have done.⁴ It was necessary to set up a crisis cell in charge of restoring the collective heritage of thought, and it was at this time that certain small groups strongly comparable to Greenpeace of culture and memory appeared on the international abnormal scene. We infiltrated or even absorbed some of them to speed up our research, and the others fell silent when the problem was solved. Only a few containment processes within the noosphere remained active in cases of force majeure. Finally, we are now opting for external strategies or more surgical interventions within the noosphere.

First of all, location. The vast majority of narrative anomalies are spotted by simple artificial intelligences employed by the Foundation, which are very old but still sufficiently effective today. The Pataphysics Department employs just over 40% of these artificial intelligences alone. Among them, there are different models such as I/O-ISMETA or I/O-MANDELA robots, quite common when it comes to searching for conversations on the web. They are a kind of evolution of search bots that worked only by keywords.

Once a narrative anomaly is identified, an attempt is usually made to make contact with it. Getting in touch with narratives is always a very complex process: it's quite as if two different worlds were confronting each other, and sometimes a great deal of diplomacy is required. At one time SCP-423 was used to make contact with certain narrative anomalies, but over time it was judged not to be a very reliable tool. A major reform of the Department's workforce was passed at the time to find a way to replace it. In any event, the priority is first and foremost to identify which category of narrative anomaly one is dealing with, before quickly running away. Only then is it time to move on to containment.

Queneau Class: A Book without Reader is a Dead Book

The first thing to remember about the containment of anomalous narrations is the sentence that serves as the title of this part. A book without a reader is a dead book: indeed, beyond the cruel truth of the literary milieu depicted by this quotation, the noosphere is irremediably affected by it. Not reading a book, therefore, becomes a means of allowing it to fade into the collective consciousness. The vast majority of containment methods try to take advantage of this adage.

We had previously separated the physical vector and the narrative anomaly itself, quietly sheltered from the noosphere. A classic way of containing a narrative anomaly is therefore to censor or even destroy its supports, and to keep only one of them. This is a strategy generally adopted for all anomalous books: SCP-701 is the most famous example. We then find ourselves with a single means of reciprocal communication with the anomaly: what do we do?

One can decide to simply close the book and never open it again. But this is the procedure to follow for anomalous items: a department does not build itself up by closing books. Some anomalies are more pernicious and, as mentioned earlier, are contagious. The conversion of other narratives is not limited to physical proximity, as we have seen. It is first necessary to establish the rules of conversion:

What do the works affected by the anomaly have in common?
What can be said about these works before and after conversion?
Is it a matter of gender, style, period?
Why has Hamlet become a recipe?

It is these kinds of questions and many others that need to be asked. Once the modus operandi of the anomaly has been established, it is time to establish countermeasures.

First of all, a bait can be set up. Many artificial intelligences were provided to the Pataphysics Department when it was reformed in 2010. Highly efficient, they are capable of regularly generating fictions according to a set of pre-established tropes and of creating perfect bait for contagious narrative anomalies. Sometimes even, for the needs of containment, these fictions are edited. Yes. A narrative AI that has proven itself in the production of well-tried fictions based on the same model to confine a particularly tough anomaly is nicknamed a good Musso. Once again, a nickname all the more amusing as the Department's senior staff knows that "Guillaume Musso" is indeed regularly reviewed by the Engineering Department's teams.

Otherwise, we can try to limit the damage by isolating the anomaly and infecting its narrative with different processes that will effectively confine it. These are discussed in the next section, but the usual measures used against infohazards are just as effective. Remember: a book needs a reader. Although some anomalies act independently of the reader, sometimes an anomalous piece of fiction simply seems to want attention. It is not a real desire, more a kind of reflex due to its condition. So eliminate the reader (not literally, of course), and the anomaly will neutralize itself.

Neutralize is a strong word, though: we are not the Global Occult Coalition, and we are not allowed to neutralize anomalies permanently. Fortunately, the exception related to narrative anomalies is that their neutralization is temporary. Without a reader, they end up entering a kind of hibernation. It is this state that is sought by the narrative containment teams. In the event that the anomaly is read again, it could reconnect to the noosphere and become active again.

However, in order to be able to continue to study the anomalies confined within our walls without transforming all the documentation into shopping lists or fanfictions, several protocols for digitizing anomalous documents were established. They are grouped together under the name of Fahrenheit Protocols: anti-memetic filters allowing the document consulted to be erased from the consultant's memory after a certain time, narrative locks against the metanarrative facetiaes of Navidson Class anomalies, memetic agents blocking access to the noosphere through the consultant's brain, and many others, sometimes combined together. In the same way, it is forbidden to enter the archives of the Pataphysics Department without wearing specific goggles capable of blocking the infohazards and the access of the anomaly to the noosphere.

Cervantes Class: Stylistic Incarcerations

When it comes to conscious anomalies, it's a different matter. We come back to the eternal debate about whether narrative entities feel pain and emotions or whether they imitate them, in one sentence: should we be concerned with ethical issues when confining narrative entities? If the debate still exists, the question no longer arises.

In the past, methods of containment resembled methods of torture more than anything else. Let's talk about containment by Recursive Intrigues. The principle is simple and is based on the fact that conscious narrative entities alter a narrative as they progress through it. A researcher had proposed the creation of a set of recursive intrigues in which to enclose the subject. The intrigue loops back on itself, usually short enough to prevent the entity from performing too many actions that could break the loop. The problem is that entities always end up going almost crazy and more dangerous, or even causing much more worrying problems.

This kind of method gave birth to the Pataphysics Historical and Eclectic Division of Reports and the Abnormal, the PHEDRA. The PHEDRA in its day consisted of a whole team of outstanding writers armed with a literary baggage of hardened steel, specially trained to write environments of containment that would engulf their hosts in a molasses of fate and tragic destiny.

The worst enemy for the anomalous character is his/her story: make it unbearable, make the style heavier, use the right sentences at the right time, and the book will become a nightmare for a Cervantes Class entity. But if the methods of the PHEDRA have been modified and abandoned, for the most part, it is not because of a question of ethics: it is a question of deontology, which was addressed when the great reforms of the Pataphysics Department were implemented concerning the damage inflicted on the noosphere and our methods of containment.

A short historical and artistic aside:

Prof. Gustav Reuel was an eminent researcher in the Department of Art History, and one of the great thinkers of the Abnormal Conservative current of the late 20^th century. At that time, manufactured anomalies were booming and spreading with alarming speed on the market. The Foundation, therefore, considered for a moment the possibility of destroying these anomalies: in fact, their conservation was based solely on the principle of rarity and on the principle of study. Neither of these principles was taken into account in the case of manufactured anomalies: they could almost be mass-produced and reproduced, so we knew more or less how they worked. The Foundation, therefore, began to delegate several cases to the Global Occult Coalition, in order to remain consistent in its principles.

However, anomalous art got involved. The History of Anomalous Art is a vast and conflicting subject, I will try to be brief in order to get to the point. Since the Dada, Surrealist, and Impressionist movements, which responded to the horror and absurdity of war by deconstructing Art with a capital A and a sharp criticism of humanity, it has become difficult to define the boundary between art and non-art. One will automatically think of Duchamp's ready-made, and of all the everyday objects that the artist can proclaim as work. It so happens that the anarchist movements associated with these ideologies emerged well after the shots were fired, around 1952. In fact, abnormal technical breakthroughs would not explode until this period, as the few resources that had previously existed were better hidden from the public and were heavily requisitioned for the needs of the Seventh Occult War.

However, the Foundation and the GOC will treat anartists like other technology production companies: if it can be rebuilt, there's no need to bother. The GOC and even some of the Foundation's directors (especially in certain areas of North-West America, particularly affected by anartist demonstrations) will encourage the recovery and mass destruction of anomalous works of art, not without capturing and interviewing the anartists behind them. This practice was all the more common as artistic performances exploded at the time, and some works were thus ephemeral (and often all the more dangerous).

In reaction to the destruction measures advocated in Eastern Europe against modern anart, Prof. Gustav Reuel imposed the idea that the destruction of anomalous art would be considered a form of censorship and an attack on the collective heritage of humanity. Reuel claimed that the evolution of anomalous art, in a sense, was part of the History of Art as a whole. In the same way, artistic creation, even using anomalous tools, was for him a right of humanity. Prof. Reuel's work made many waves in his time and even today, but ultimately his theories completely changed the way narrative anomalies were dealt with.

Applying Reuelean and conservative thinking to the problem of the containment of narrative anomalies, their unethical confinement is considered an alteration of the work. To put it simply, if we consider that a Cervantes Class anomaly is conscious, then it is appropriate to establish a containment with a minimum of ethics. On the other hand, if we decide to consider that this same anomaly is not conscious, it remains a work of art: any attack on its integrity is therefore considered an act of vandalism. A conservation policy is therefore applied, in which the narrative anomaly must be studied with the greatest care in order to alter its nature as little as possible.

End of the aside.

Thus, the majority of the anomalies handled by the Pataphysics Department are now contained with the greatest care. Contact with the Cervantes is rather made through lengthy negotiations, sometimes with the support of other cooperative metanarrative entities, through false threats never carried out or by exploiting the very particular psychology of a narrative entity to trap it unwittingly in its own narrative bias. Recalcitrant and dangerous entities alone are considered a threat and their confinements are reinforced. Security above all.

Nevertheless, there are still some elements opposed to the conservation policy and wishing for the return of the old methods of containment: these are based on the argument that the Cervantes are works that evolve over time, in the manner of a performance. According to this logic, what happens to the work is automatically part of it, and the old methods of containment of the PHEDRA would therefore not be an attack on their integrity. PHEDRA, for its part, is still relevant, but less present and much more careful in its elaboration of fictional cells.

Finally, we discussed the role of the number of readers and the number of interpretations in the formation of Cervantes Class anomalies. Yes, increasing the number of readers of a fiction can prevent the formation of a Cervantes.⁵ No, the Foundation is not responsible for the creation of fanfiction.net and half of the discussion forums about your favourite story. Discussions about these passions are phenomena that already happen very well on their own, and which, to make matters worse, are not looked upon favourably by advocates of the noosphere. Indeed, we are still unable to know whether this constitutes a development of the noosphere or a form of "natural pollution" of it.

Here we find a problem similar to global warming (if so). Before the reforms of the Pataphysics Department, when it was still possible to manipulate the noosphere, as a preventive measure we allowed ourselves to highlight potentially dangerous fictions instead of censoring them. In this way, we hoped to delay the arrival of war narrative anomalies in the escalation of violence, destruction, death, and so forth.

The problem is that in doing so, these fictions and concepts have taken on certain importance within the noosphere. And so we saw similar fictions grow, which had to be put forward again, and the vicious circle was set in motion. Today, while we have stopped this preventive operation, the process continues without our help, and we don't have enough hindsight and credit to devote to the phenomenon in order to determine whether it represents a real threat to the noosphere. I don't know about you, but this situation is vaguely familiar to me. But let's try not to dwell on personal considerations.

Navidson Class: Final Cut

There is a division of the Pataphysics Department more powerful than PHEDRA, empowered to use narratives of massive destruction, create narrative anomalies and in case of extreme urgency to modify the noosphere. Internal to the department, it was named Narrative Task Force Delta-42 "Le Côté-du-Manche", and is virtually one of the intervention forces with the most members at the Foundation. Being able to create narrative anomalies to combat the most dangerous narrative entities, NTF Delta-42 is theoretically capable of having as many members as it can write.

When tackling Navidson Class anomalies, there is often nothing to do but wait for the end of the story. Delta-42 intervenes in these situations in order to hasten the end. This is the so-called Final Cut strategy. The NTF first sends its narrative scouts to the area affected by the Navidson, in order to gather as much information as possible about the rules of operation of the fiction in progress. A range of clichés is tested and provoked in order to understand what narrative rules the NTF is dealing with. The information is then compiled and analysed in order to find the narrative flaws of the anomaly. Once this step has been completed, the scouts pose as characters and the coordinators give them several indications and narrative counter-measures in order to hasten the end of the story.

A crisis situation managed by "Le Côté-du-Manche" is fascinating to observe. Each of its members must know how a situation is supposed to end, which tropes are at work, and when what to do to prevent this from happening, and how this will affect the rest of the story. To quote Director Panagiotopolous: "Le Côté-du-Manche is a bit like writing a story with 36 hands, but all the hands deal with the same sentence at the same time". NTF Delta-42, for the record, was born out of incidents involving another cursed name in the history of narrative confinement: Murphy Law. The incident had become so widespread that there was even a time when there was talk of militarising the metafictional resources of the Pataphysics Department.

Hazred Class: Narration as Passage

Fake narrative anomalies exist. Very often, these are phenomena or entities that use narrative support as a passage to our world. Since the noosphere is quite malleable, if one has the ability to manipulate it as one pleases, it is then possible to create very effective portals between one world and another. The downside is that these portals are basically only used to convey ideas, feelings, and information, as any good book would do. For example, you will notice that a demonic entity is never invoked through an old grimoire, but that it is invoked by reciting the information it contains. An entity that is not narrative in nature is incapable of going through the narrative as a Navidson would.

These anomalies are not considered narrative anomalies strictly speaking, as they are relatively simple to contain: they sometimes have the destructive potential of a Navidson, but invariably the Special Containment Procedures of a harmless Queneau. Very often, the anomaly is thus not the narrative support, and therefore does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Pataphysics Department.

Examples of Hazred Class anomalies:

SCP-701 - The Hanged King's Tragedy
SCP-161-FR - The Book and the Beast
SCP-306-FR - The Artists' Book
SCP-400-FR - She's too beautiful to be true

Narrative Thaumiels

Perhaps it is time, as we approach the end of this booklet, to re-establish a truth that is too often forgotten:

The Pataphysics Department has nothing to do with 'pataphysics.

This sentence may seem absurd, but it turns out that pataphysics suffers from the same problem as memetics, so that when in certain circles of abnormal research it was necessary to create a term to designate the strength of ideas rather than anomalous ideas, we have seen some researchers use the new term 'memetics, in the vain hope of making things easier to understand.

'Pataphysics is an absurd literary, philosophical and poetic movement invented by the writer Alfred Jarry in SCP-410-FR, a book entitled Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. The pataphysics, within the SCP Foundation, refers to the study of anomalous phenomena of a narrative nature. If I may make this aside, it is because SCP-410-FR, despite its classification as Neutralized, is considered within the Pataphysics Department as an extreme case of Narrative Thaumiel.

Narrative Thaumiels are a category of narrative anomaly which in ancient times were called Reverse Navidsons, or Super-Navidsons: these anomalies are capable of rendering reality fictitious, in the case of SCP-410-FR of purely and simply neutralising anomalous phenomena. The common principle of these anomalies is that they are able to bend reality through the noosphere in order to make use of the beliefs of humanity: if the latter considers that one of our creatures only exists in books, then the Narrative Thaumiel will take care of erasing it from reality.

Narrative Thaumiels are as dangerous as they are extremely rare. The conditions leading to the creation of such anomalies are extremely specific and random, requiring narrative support and a rate of diffusion that is not always clear to the public. Even the intervention of the abnormal is something we are not sure about: Jarry himself was fervently convinced that the abnormal did not exist, and it is impossible for us to know whether he was a reality bender with the little information available on SCP-410-FR. The Phobetor Project tried for years to understand and reproduce the effects of SCP-410-FR for emergency neutralisations, with no success.

The danger of these anomalies is that they are based on beliefs, not objective reality: if enough people decide that a place, event, or species does not exist, that is what could happen. Here again, noosphere and biosphere communicate: our department and the Department of Ecology and Sustainable Development, during recent work aimed at studying the links between these two concepts, raised the question of whether the disappearance of certain species was not due to phenomena of Narrative Thaumiels. For the time being, these are only correlations, but because of certain anomalous phenomena, believing that certain species are endangered would actually endanger them. I will leave you to imagine the carnage of debate that these studies have provoked since without calling into question the rescue brought to these plants and animals, they technically encourage us not to worry about them.

It is difficult to expand on the subject of Narrative Thaumiels without opening dangerous doors, so I recommend that you inform yourself about the work of the Observatory of Anomalous and Socio-Cultural Correlations if you wish to go further, at your own risk. Be careful, however, as some of their work and research is potentially outside your Clearance Level. I myself am surprised to encounter so many error messages.

The Language Bureau: What about Translation?

We are entering the conceptual underbelly of the Pataphysics Department, so forgive me if I have difficulties going into details and if I will be brief. The Bureau of Translation and Cultural Study of Narrative and Language, very often simplified in BTCN by the official documents and in Bureau of Language⁶ by the members of the Department, is more or less the main body responsible for research in all matters other than the containment of narrative anomalies. More specifically, the Language Bureau is concerned with research on narrative, language, and its subtleties from one culture to another. For my part, I am more specialized in containment, and of the Language Bureau's missions, I retain mainly that its work has been very useful to us in order to establish the appropriate diplomatic dialogue with several anomalies coming from different narrative cultures.

I remember this ancient collection of Japanese poetry, in which the kanji and kanas (the writing signs used) were read from top to bottom, in a way that is uncommon by European standards. We were literally not on the same wavelength with this anomaly. Add to this the honorific nature of the Japanese language and some misplaced cultural barriers, and we were very relieved to see the agents of the Language Bureau take charge of the negotiations that day. I seem to remember that Rimbaud's works owe them a great deal.

It seems that the translation of a work has no real influence on the development of the anomaly linked to it. However, in the case of the Queneau Class Anomalies, the Language Bureau has already observed some unusual behaviors related to translation from one language to another. In particular, it has been noted that a narrative anomaly is capable of visiting/infecting another work independently of its language since the noosphere is a sphere of ideas. However, not all cultures share the same ideas, and this is where anomalies sometimes break down.

Yes, narrative anomalies can be victims of homesickness, cultural inequality, segregation, and xenophobia. I'm telling you, it's not that different from sociology. Narrative depends entirely on humanity and its organization, so I am rarely surprised when I see abnormal tags vandalizing museums in Northern Europe as in 2012, or to see tensions between certain forms of literature. What is fascinating is that these art to art relationships are truly geopolitical, dare I say historic-geopolitical despite the visual and phonetic horror that is the word, since these conflicts cut across artistic eras and movements as well as cultures. Moreover, as we have previously mentioned, narrative anomalies are extremely limited, provided they do not act simply out of automatism.

And believe me, in spite of the fact that I know little about the Language Bureau and its subtleties, I am very grateful to an organization that is legislating in order to prevent the outbreak of a Spatio-temporal narrative war.

SCP International

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