Hyperreality and Illusion: A Study of Simulation in Selected Novels of Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne

Abstract

This paper reflects on the purpose of literary illusion as a kind of simulation in two big texts of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). The paper relies on the theoretical concepts of Jean Baudrillard in his theory of simulacra and argues that in both novels, realism is not a one-to-one representation of reality but a meticulously crafted illusion that functions through the use of narrative structure. Using the norms of the empirical travel literature, Swift constructs fictional worlds which satirize Enlightenment rationalism, scientific authority, and political ideology, thus performing what Baudrillard describes as the First Order of simulacra, or the Counterfeit. Sterne, in his turn, inverts this process and begins to prophesy the mechanics of narration as such, breaking the linearity, coherence, and the expectation of mimesis by radical digression and experimentation with type. His novel illustrates the Second Order of simulacra, Simulation of Production, when the representation is not in the likeness of reality but shows the process of its construction. Collectively, these readings show that illusion in literature does not serve as an escapist function but it is rather a critical tool that disrupts the certainty of backyard epistemology and reveals the artificiality of realism. The paper places Swift and Sterne in a historical vortex of simulation that prefigures the postmodern anxieties of the inability to keep truth, representation, meaning stable.