Desdemona (character)
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The fictional character Desdemona appears in the Jimmy Buffett novel Where Is Joe Merchant?, published in 1992. The central theme of the book is the search for the title character, chiefly by his sister Trevor Kane, but also many other contributing characters, including Desdemona.
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[edit] Character Background
Desdemona, a major character in the novel but not it's protagonist, is a psychic based on a small island off the coast of Hispaniola. In the book, she finds her mission to be the building of a rocket ship to travel to the Pleiades. Lacking both science knowledge and working capital, she bases her rocket ship on the long abandoned rusting hulk of an airplane fuselage that had once belonged to Howard Hughes. While theoretically under construction, her ship the Cosmic Muffin also serves as her houseboat and hosts her bakery business.
Desdemona's psychic abilities involve nearly random reception of messages (usually phrased as riddles, much to her consternation) concerning both life itself and the eponymous search for Joe Merchant. She and Joe Merchant first cross paths in the 1960's in San Francisco. As their paths developed, she became a backup singer in Merchant's band, and was once married to an associate of Merchant's. Following the break up of both her band and her marriage, and the descent of Merchant into the drug world (Desdemona herself was famed for her pot-brownies while in San Francisco), she worked her way south through the midwestern states, then to Mexico, where her interest in Astronomy and psychic ability was cultivated. Ultimately, she arrived in the small carribbean island of Little Lorraine.
[edit] Character Basis & Philosophy
The character of Desdemona shares several traits with other well known characters from humourous fiction/science fiction. As an example, the philosophy Desdemona describes is very similar to that displayed by the character of Bokonon, the calypso prophet, from the Kurt Vonnegut book Cat's Cradle, amongst others. Both characters make extensive use of caribbean mysticism, and both employ a type of folksy prose to disseminate their calming philosophical messages. It is not known whether this similarity was intentional, or whether this is simply a case of both characters being steeped in carribbean mysticism/fatalism and therefore necessarily appearing similar. In any event Desdemona's drive to assist Trevor Kane in the search for her brother, as with her drive to construct a rocket ship to visit the stars, is not so much a matter of personal choice as it is her preordained fate - her calling from elsewhere. An example of this from the book: "You didn't find me, Trevor... you were sent to me. You are a very pretty piece to a very large puzzle"
[edit] Other
This characterization of Desdemona also appears in several of Mr. Buffett's songs. Among these are "Fruitcakes" and "Desdemona's Building a Rocket Ship", from the album Banana Wind.
The character does, of course, have significant parallels to the more famous literary Desdemona from Shakespeare's Othello.
