SLPAD - 14 - Pig, Nerissa, & the possibility of playfulness

[Michael Bailey]

Dennis Flange ran away with “Lowlands,” which was originally supposed to be
about Pig Bodine.

There’s no mention of Jethro Bodine, who was a mere future shirttail
relative of the Beverly Hills Clampetts at the inception of “Lowlands,” but
who had become a frequent peopler of reruns by the time of the writing of
the Intro. Probably a case of non-synchronistic resemblance, or less
probably a Hollywood Pynchon-fan scriptwriter’s bowdlerization &
de-militarization of Pig Bodine.

I’ve flirted with the notion of French philosopher Jean Bodin as a source
for Pig, but there’s really no evidence for that.

The crux of the tale, ab initio (as a result of the imago impression of the
“sooey generis” Pig character in the author’s life & imagination) then,
might have been to show how the psychopomp PB was able to draw DF out of
his aspirational lifestyle, & marriage, back down to the literal dump, in a
“schlemihl with a thousand faces” scenario.

Would it be fair to call the DF character much more resemblant of his
author, and thus more accessible to author and likely readers?

In that case, the story transmutation he deprecates was actually quite
brilliant, imho. Besides being a cautionary tale that explores the
attraction of being “cammed…out of the safe furrow” (as was the drunken
sailor with the WASTE tattoo in CoL49), it also provides a sense of the
relaxed hedonism missing from Flange’s work/life balance pre-Bodine. To
call the Nerissa character a mere figurant, or moving to the dump a mere
devolution, would be to understate the importance of her cheery presence in
that somehow inhabitable squalor. His wife was not depicted as someone DF
looked forward to seeing, but Nerissa teased his sense of possibilities.

But, gotta say, the mature author has nailed it. Still a dern good story,
but not very mature, is it?

According to
https://nameberry.com/babyname/nerissa
Nerissa is from Greek, and means “from the sea” in accordance with the
omphalo-Naval resonances throughout the tale.


There’s quite an interesting tale of a Nerissa de-listed as deceased from
Burke’s Peerage in 1940, who actually lived on, neglected by all her
aristocratic relatives, in a mental ward until 1986.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerissa_and_Katherine_Bowes-Lyon