A bad ride at Disney World.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne

I'm going to Disney World," said Lorena Bobbitt cheerily upon being released from the particular set of ordeals that had become her life. It's become a common tag line for Americans celebrating such closures, or simply suffering from that old "there-must-be-some-way-out-of-here" feeling of postmodern frenzy. Disney World: the ultimate escape, the "nowhere" destination that is "just like the world, only better."

After all these years of avoiding it, I had begun to feel pressure to check it out. For one thing, it had become difficult to face my Long Island students as a Disney virgin, and maintain credibility as an authority on popular culture. And so I dragged my daughter (the one person always willing to accompany me into cultural terrain where no one else will be caught dead) and headed south, at the height of the summer-vacation season, to meet the Head Mouse.

It was an experience for which, I confess, I was ill prepared. To visit Disney World is to be transported, in more ways than one: to be immersed in a universe that is somehow totally "Other," "Elsewhere," even as it is - paradoxically - the most mundanely quintessential of American landscapes.

There's nothing here that you haven't seen or experienced a million times, every day of your life, in every mall and airport and multiplex and fast-food franchise. And yet, to find yourself - like Dorothy in Munchkin Land - suddenly set down in the middle of a vast landscape in which no trace of anything noncommodified, non-simulated, nonregulated, non-smiley-faced, is visible or reachable, is to suffer a profound mental disorientation. Most people seem gleefully and instantaneously to adapt to this new psychic environment. I did not do so well.

"Transported" is actually a perfect term to describe the experience of being Disney-fied. From the minute you hit the Orlando airport, you enter a system of transit that moves you effortlessly, via monorails and people movers, through underground tunnels decorated, almost nostalgically, with scenes of the "real" Florida, the one that Disney so strenuously attempts to supersede and render superfluous. From there, it's a quick ride to the 28,000-acre enclave - a self-contained, self-regulated fiefdom in the middle of, but wholly separate from, the state of Florida. And then it's into another, even more elaborate system of monorails that whisk you, with utmost efficiency and ease, through a series of prescribed routes to preplanned itineraries.

"Day One," begins the Disney guidebook you probably selected from a shelf full of choices - Disney With Kids, Disney on a Budget, Disney for Honeymooners, Disney Without Kids - at your local Barnes and Noble. And then come pages of dauntingly detailed, rigidly precise schedules of events and sights and rides, accompanied by timetables, tips, rules, and coupons to help you complete the exhausting course.

"You must stay at least six days," said my travel agent, with a Disneyesque cheeriness, "or you'll never see everything." Never mind that "everything" on Day Six was pretty much the same as "everything" on Day One.

Indeed, the sameness, the static predictability of this wholly managed, wholly simulated world of "Taylorized fun," as it's been described, seems to be a large part of its appeal. Nothing can possibly go wrong here, because nothing can possibly happen.

But the nothing that endlessly doesn't happen is designed to fill the senses and the...