OCKHAM'S RAZOR A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
OCKHAM'S RAZOR
A Saul Vogel Mystery

“Don’t you feel sorry for your characters?” Vogel asked, as I finished reading some of my short stories to him. “You make them feel so much, think so much and suffer so much.”
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of 8. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape allegedly had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints – leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life: never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”

“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date! Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.

The Reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the surrounding woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.

In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy paths, which Vogel called donkey trails. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky nor sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.

As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. The threshold of Hell, I thought but Master sped forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.
People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another – mendicants’ rags, yet another – frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch, and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.

In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all. Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense: D’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falls out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”

“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The old, immobile and dead d’Artagnan changed suddenly into the youngster he had been before setting off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their part in the plot.
“He’s been dead as a doornail. What made him alive again, Master?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure. The writer creates these individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text, making them perform once more. And think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”

He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors, and he made the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”).
I refrain from quoting his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Dumas, Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek, Hrabal and Hašek.
As we saw mine, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “mine” moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.

“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we rushed back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“You are talented, yes, but can you fill Rostand’s shoes? My advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.




















Copyright © Peter Billig 2007