Hyperreality: Baudrillard, Simulation, and the Postmodern Novel

W alk through the reconstructed Main Street at Disneyland and you are standing inside a paradox that the philosopher Jean Baudrillard spent much of his career trying to name. The street is not a replica of an actual American town. It never existed anywhere else first. It is a fully realized environment built to feel more authentically "small town America" than any actual small town could manage, complete with a nostalgia no genuine Main Street from the 1900s ever quite had while it was being lived in. Baudrillard's word for that condition, a copy so complete and so convincing that it displaces the need for an original entirely, is hyperreality. It is one of the more difficult concepts in postmodern theory to hold onto, precisely because it describes something we now live inside so constantly that it has become nearly invisible. This is a close reading of the term: where it comes from, what Baudrillard actually meant by it, how it differs from related ideas like simulation…