The hyperreal is an event marked by the ambiguity brought forth by the continual replication of the image. Necessarily, it problematizes the relationship between the subject and the real by positing a lack in cognition, by the subject, in the ability to differentiate between the real and the hyperreal. The tension that arises from this consequence is the groundwork for postmodern fiction, which follows a protagonist in their desire for the real, but ultimately traces their delirious obsession with locating the real. Inspired by Baudrillard, hyperreality explores the images that have replaced the certainty of the conscious mind with mere representations. Theories of the hyperreal argue that subjects have lost their referent for the real and the immediate disorientation represents the absurd nature to the hyperreal. This essay will explore the idea of hyperreality through the postmodern texts The Matrix and The Crying of Lot 49 and will follow closely to the theoretical framework of Baudrillard’s Precession of Simulacra. Similar throughout these texts, is the conception of the sign as a device, which inspires an innate desire towards the real. Pynchon depicts an inner mundane obsession with symbols, while The Matrix displays the outer – or over – mechanisms of the hyperreal. All while Baudrillard himself is affirming, while concurrently negating at times, the French contentious school of post-structuralism. All protagonists of hyperreal fiction are unique because of their flawed self; they attempt to find meaning through the repetition of the meaningless world but effectively fail at finding truth. Or, they succeed in the revelation of the obscured, and naturally false, nature of truth.

Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal is as revelatory as it is contentious. Unlike his French post-structuralist colleagues, (Lacan, Foucault) Baudrillard is not particularly concerned with the psychological arrangement of the individual subject. Instead, the atmospheric field is representative of how the hyperreal interacts. This spatial field is depicted as above the real and is something that permanently conditions the experience of the real to an extent that makes it invalid; innate to its relevance, the condition of the hyperreal necessitates the illegitimacy of the real. Thus the death of the real – God’s been dead for a while now – isolates simulation as the recurring existence of human subjects. Simulation is what guarantees the hyperreal’s establishment and its domination over human cognition – “never again will the real have the chance to produce itself – such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.” (Baudrillard)

Simulation and simulacra signify the circular entrapment, and coincidently the logic, of the hyperreal. Simulation is characterized by the merger of what is seen as real and its infinite representations and the result of this problematized relationship; the lack of difference between the real and the hyperreal. Tangential to simulation, simulacrum defines the copy without an original. The death of the original model is a consistent revelation in postmodern work – here, it manifests in the possibility for the copy to remain its own entity outside of any original source. As Baudrillard differentiates, “simulation stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.” (Baudrillard) The death of the original model has forced the subject to remain indifferent to the domination of the hyperreal over the real; the hyperreal, and its trace, has effectively replaced, while fixating parallel to, the real.

The end world logic of hyperreality is brought upon by the infinite replication of the image. Baudrillard argues that technology has reached its outer-limit and has fulfilled is innate capabilities to project anything new. This symptom locates itself as a function of technology and media, which promptly dissociated the traumatic experience with its perpetual simulation. All logic of simulation is exclusive to fact and reasoning; the hyperreal has replaced established philosophical claims – whether its logic, reason – with the logic of simulation. Baudrillard is concise – “this anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonistic poles), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory – all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle.” (Baudrillard) There is no order to facts, but are simply born out of the replication of models. The model becomes the operative tool for events, thought, time, space, and so on – the circulations of models project these worldly simulations.

The Crying of Lot 49 implores Baudrillardian interpretation. Pynchon’s novel follows the protagonist, Oedipa, in her desire to find the real through the sign. Oedipa is in continual communication with the sign, as it designates her actions, thoughts, and behaviors on all conditions. To an overtly obsessive extent, Oedipa is living through the indeterminate space between the real and the hyperreal. Her encounter with signs defines her existence, as her ontological configuration becomes a search for meaning through the sign. But as Baudrillard argues, finding meaning in a hyperreal world is impossible; only delirium results in such a contrived search. This paper will trace key elements of the hyperreal within Oedipa’s journey: the usage of post-industrialism and the play of usage of The Courier’s Tragedy.

Baudrillard’s hyperreal is contingent to the post-industrial event. This stems from his critique of orthodox Marxism, which posits alternative factors to the capitalist replication and divisions of labor. Through his critique of commercial society – coined under media relations – Baudrillard offers insight to what the world of post-industrialism means for the real. Pynchon, comparably, articulates a similar premise under the character of Stanley Koteks. Koteks works for the giant conglomerate Yoyodyne as an engineer – but his creativity is stifled. In dialogue with Oedipa, Koteks claims that ‘teamwork’ has effectively replaced creativity and continues to haunt the possibility of the creative mind. How strikingly similar is this to the Baudrillard end world theory? While Baudrillard articulates the end of the original model as the death of any future creativity, Pynchon is directly representing this theme through fiction and its actuality. Oedipa, in reflection of her meeting Koteks, discusses this with Mike Fallopian: “in school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor – Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grow up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent – only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that?” (Pynchon 70)

Capital functions within Baudrillard as this post-industrial level – “it is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law.” (Baudrillard) He argues that capital is just as arbitrary a unit as any social phenomena he chooses to investigate. The Marxist critique of capital falls short of coherent reality because inevitably, according to Baudrillard, the redirection of capital – from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat – just changes the morality surrounding capital, and nothing else. It is targeting towards the betterment of the society, but does not transform the economy. The realization of this argument, is within the post-industrial economy – where the source of innovation and production is merely a replication of simulacrum.

Pynchon’s usage of The Courier’s Tragedy is a postmodern presentation within the text. The summary of the play, which Oedipa becomes fascinated in, is presented as a text inside the text. And as The Crying of Lot 49 develops, one finds similar parallels between both texts. It is this play of words that dramatically influence the experience of reading the text. The length of the insert – roughly ten pages – confuses the reader into analyzing every detail. But this is representative of the text as a whole and its postmodern imperative: there is value in everything because everything, under the premise of the hyperreal, is valueless. Meaning is not subjective or even relative – it is just the cognitive attempt of the human to find values in signs.

Oedipa is continually looking for connections between signs and events. A major example of this within the text takes place when at the end of the play, the character Driblette utters the sign “Trystero” – “the word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to.” (Pynchon 58) This inspires Oedipa to dig deeper into the meaning of the sign and culminates in a discussion with the source of the sign, Driblette. Out of curiosity, Oedipa approaches Driblette with an intention to extort information regarding the sign. To her great disappointment, Driblette is seemingly indifferent to what he pronounced on stage, his reluctance to place meaning on the text of the play or the spoken word of pronouncement brings Oedipa anxiety. But as the conversation moves, Driblette becomes angered by the persistence of Oedipa’s questions – insinuating, to Oedipa, that there is more beyond this coincidence (the circular logic of the hyperreal). The conversation concludes in a meta-fictional style, as Driblette’s insecurity of his particular take on this play, including the insignificant additions of words, amounts to staunch defense – “the words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.” (Pynchon 62)

Whereas The Crying of Lot 49 continually plays with the role of signs and their relation to an indeterminate reality, The Matrix is more fixated on a center of simulated production. The Matrix displays a dystopian future where the human population experiences reality only through simulation. The film follows Neo as he discovers the ‘truth’ – relative to the fictional film The Matrix and not to the Baudrillardian hyperreal – of the mechanisms of simulation brought forth by an automated intelligence with an agenda to subdue the human population. The Matrix promotes its own conceptions of reality and hyperreality, implying that there are truths to be find within one’s like – this, for Morpheus, is the rejection of the real nature of the simulation. Thus, Neo’s journey is traced by his attempt to unravel the peculiarity surrounding the Matrix as a free subject. It is worth noting that this is inherently different to Baudrillard, who would diminish the value of truth in an era of extenuating replication of simulation.

Neo’s drive towards freedom – as a will to truth – surrounds the film with themes of escaping from illusion. Morpheus, Neo’s mentor, provides the theoretical work behind the matrix and its opposite – reality. From the beginning, Morpheus is seen to have a grasp on the necessary questions and answers. As an arbiter of truth, Morpheus reaches out to Neo, fulfilling a faithful prophecy. This is represented early in the film, when Morpheus first encounters Neo; the blue pill and red pill allude to two distinct paths that Neo can freely choose. On the one hand, the blue pill symbolizes illusion and fantasy (staying in the Matrix) while the red pill symbolizes truth (finding the real) – “after this, there is no going back. You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.” (Matrix)

Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek interprets this text similarly and finds irregularity between the hyperreal and the real. For him, there is a third option – or a third way out of the problem of the hyperreal – “but the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions but these are fictions that already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it you lose reality itself. I want a third pill, so what is the third pill? Definitely not a kind of transcendental pill that enables a fake fast food religious experience but a pill that would enable me to perceive, not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.” (Zizek) While the hyperreal within The Matrix stands for the machine itself, within theory the hyperreal has no source of origin but is permeated into existence by the very death of this system.

But alike to Baudrillard, The Matrix places the hyperreal within an event – a split in time itself. The Matrix takes place in a post-apocalyptic world; the sun has been destroyed and all humanity with it. Morpheus shows Neo this through a computer program designed to situate residual self-images in a simulation. Neo is immediately taken back at this with anxiety, and rejects the ability of simulated technology to appear so real. To Neo’s amazement, Morpheus responds – “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain…you have been living inside a dreamworld, Neo. As in Baudrillard’s vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is the world as it exists today…the desert of the real.” (The Matrix)

The hyperreal, within both texts, functions to provide a perverse element to reality. But necessarily to the hyperreal, this element disguises the affects of the real and creates something entirely new. This fusion of reality and hyperreality is the consistent voice of Baudrillard throughout postmodern fiction. It leaves subjects in despair, anxiety, and anger as they try to make meaning out of the affects of the hyperreal. There is no real, and the hyperreal is indistinguishable. What remains: a hybrid notion of ulterior reality – the effective change of the real into something completely foreign. The direct provocation of such an affect is the delirious nature of hyperreality – “when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality – a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity… Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us – a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.” (Baudrillard)

The hermeneutics of texts reveal their transformative capabilities upon subjects in reality and in fiction. Not only do texts have implications on characters, but also on readers who occupy the space between the text and their interpretation. The emotions that spawn from texts are illuminative of the postmodern nature of fiction; subjects are delirious and confused by the strategy of the postmodern text. It can appear torturous and intimidating. But, these are all the common affects of the hyperreal. These conditions are inevitable; the loss of cognitive reality, literally and rhetorically, shatters the world conceptions of subjects. It places them within the absurd, and this is the only reality they can empirically identify. It is this space that we all occupy, the hyperreal and the real, determined to cancel out each other, but failing. This failure of worlds has its immediate affect on the subject, who finds simulation, and its infinite replication, as a condition of life.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. University of Michigan Press, 1981. Print.

The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999. DVD.

Pynchon , Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial , 1965. Print.

Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dir. Sophie Fiennes. Perf. Slavoj Zizek. P Guide Ltd., 2006. DVD.