Narrative Madness
The Quixotic Quest for Reality
They were not like this before; the story has brought them together.
At the You’re Going to Die literary and music event, I read parts of “The Myth of Myths: The Development of Human Culture through Mythmaking,” which is an extract of my book Narrative Madness, available at narrativemadness.com or Amazon. This piece was influenced Jean Luc Nancy’s essay “Myth Interrupted” from his book The Inoperative Community.
Disney Parks have a couple of meta-attractions, attractions that include representations of miniature amusement parks. Visitors can see how Disney, the most famous of amusement parks, represents its own business. I am going to look at two examples, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey, which ironically warns the visitor against amusement parks, and It’s a Small World, which presents the amusement park as a unifying symbol of humanity.
Language and storytelling arose as a means of creating and maintaining social ties. Tribes then spread across the planet, trading materials, goods, technology, information and stories, so it should not come as a surprise that our narratives are similar worldwide. As humans, we make up stories habitually in order to understand the universe, ourselves and others, but we can only do so within established narrative language (as we have seen) and (this is the new part) preexisting forms and genres.