Vilification of Identity and the Exilic Narrative: The Illustrated Pied Piper Story

Abstract

In the life time of the species and in the course of individual biographies, human beings build well-defined worlds of meaning by which to organize and interpret experience. There is perhaps no greater demonstration of this world-building process than that carried out through the verbal and visual activity of story telling.This paper, traces the visible footsteps of one story in particular, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” First, it presents the origins of its dominant symbols in the visual culture of the community where it is initially told. Second, it shows how illustrated folktales like this one remain a significant aspect of what is called the visual socialization of children. Historically and cross-culturally, norms of meaning and visual meaning groups use to make sense of hu experience are transmitted to children in this way, as they begin their own world-building process.This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a total metaphor for the “journey of life.” By its verbal and visual narration, we teach this formula to every new generation as a way of ordering and interpreting experience. From the late 1200’s to the late 1900’s, this quest-myth retains its prototypical shape as it unfolds before new audiences, the Piper clothed in the archetypal garb of one who is marked for exile. Read this way, the illustrated texts of childhood provide an entirely legible architectural history of the world-building activity of generations.