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«We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented»: The Truman Show Effect
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Biancamaria Rizzardi
2022/11/24
10.13125/2039-6597/5135
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Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
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Simulacra
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28858
«We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented»: The Truman Show Effect
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12
      «We accept the reality of the world
        with which we’re presented»:
          The Truman Show Effect

                            Biancamaria Rizzardi

Abstract
      «Fantasy is like jam: you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread»:
this observation by Calvino is in line with all those narratives based on the
construction of imaginary worlds, nonexistent or invisible cities, landscape
dreams, and simulacra. In this regard, American Dreams (1974) by Carey, and
England, England (1998) by Barnes seem extremely interesting. In both texts,
it is a question of being able to invent lies capable of convincing readers,
of substituting real places with false but plausible and narratively credible
spaces. In the first case, the story showcases a point of conjunction between
postmodern and postcolonial views thanks to Carey’s way of dealing with the
theme of simulation. In the second case, the protagonist’s theme park aims
to encompass all the life-size tourist and cultural attractions across England,
appropriately selected through a survey. This is an “England, England”, a
replica truer than the truth to the point of replacing the original, which is
doomed to an irreversible decline, in a perfect depiction of the supermodernity
theorised by Augé. Both the theme park and the model town reproduce the
ideal space of those who, too accustomed to images, no longer know how to
appreciate reality or, differently put, the postmodern world. We could call
this situation the “Truman Show effect”.

Keywords
    Julian Barnes; Peter Carey; Model town; Non-places; Supermodernity;
Simulacra



Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5135
Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect




      «We accept the reality of the world
        with which we’re presented»:
          The Truman Show Effect

                             Biancamaria Rizzardi

     About halfway through Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies
(2006), the two protagonists, Uncle Nathan Glass and his nephew Tom
Wood, are travelling by car and, during the journey, the younger one tells
the older one a story, which one assumes is true. The story is about Kafka.
     The year before his death, in the autumn of 1923, Kafka was in Berlin,
with Dora Diamant. Every day he would go to the park with her for a
walk. One day he met a girl who was crying, and he asked her what was
the matter. The little girl replied that she was crying because she had lost
her doll. So, he began to make up a story to explain what had happened:
in fact, he told her that the doll was fine and had only gone on a trip and
that she would come back. The little girl being suspicious, she asked him
how he knew. And he replied that she had written to him but that unfor-
tunately he had left the letter at home and promised to bring it to her the
following day.
     Kafka immediately went home to write the letter. He sat at a table
and Dora, observing him while he was writing, noticed the same serious-
ness, the same tension and precision that he showed when composing his
prose: «precise, funny, and absorbing» (Auster 2006: 156). In the letter,
the doll reassured the child by telling her why she had gone and where
she was and promised to return to her. The next day Kafka rushed to the
park with the letter. The little girl was waiting for him, and since she had
not yet learned to read, he read it aloud to her. The doll was very sorry,
but she was tired of always living with the same people. She needed to
move and see the world, to make new friends. It wasn’t that she did not
love the girl, but she wanted a change of scenery, so they would have to
separate for some time. Finally, the doll promised that she would write
to the little girl every day and keep her informed about what she was
doing. The story went on for another three weeks and would then come



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to an end1.
      The protagonist of Auster’s novel who tells this story comments like
this: the reason why it is so difficult for Kafka to write the letter is that
Kafka knows that if he manages to present the child with a very beautiful
and convincing lie, he will replace the lost doll with a different reality, ulti-
mately false but still believable from the perspective of the laws of fiction.
      I believe that this comment is very useful in our context in order to
understand the difficulty not only of writing, but above all of writing fan-
tasy literature. In a nutshell, it is a question of replacing a given reality with
a different one, «a false one, maybe, but something true and believable
according to the laws of fiction» (Auster 2006: 155). In short, taking up the
image and words of Italo Calvino (in a television interview aired after his
death in 1985), «[f]antasy is like jam: you have to spread it on a solid slice
of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you
can’t make anything» (Scarpa 1999: 122).
      This observation perfectly fits when it comes to all those narratives
that are based on the construction of imaginary worlds, nonexistent or in-
visible cities, landscape dreams, and simulacra. For the authors of these
stories, it is a question of being able to invent lies capable of convincing
readers, of substituting real places with false but plausible and narratively
credible spaces.
      In this regard, a short story by the Australian writer Peter Carey,
American Dreams (1974), seems extremely interesting to me. In this story,


    1
         For three weeks Kafka went to the park every day and each time wrote a
new letter to the child. The doll grew up, went to school, met other people. She
kept on repeating to the little girl that she loved her, but she alluded to certain
complications that made it impossible for her to return. Gradually Kafka prepares
the little girl for the moment when the doll will disappear from her life forever.
He racked his brains to create a satisfying ending, fearing that if he did not do so,
the spell might be broken. After having considered some hypotheses, he finally
decided that the doll should get married. He described the young man she fell
in love with, the engagement party, the wedding in the country, even the house
where the doll and her husband were living. And then, in the last line, the doll
says goodbye to her old and affectionate friend. But at this point of course the
little girl no longer missed the doll. Kafka gave her something else in exchange,
and at the end of the three weeks the letters had cured her of her anguish. She
had the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live within a story, to live in
an imaginary world, the pains of this world vanish. Because as long as the story
continues, reality no longer exists.


                                                                                    425
Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



the quiet life of a provincial village (which, even if it is not specified, clear-
ly belongs to the Australian imagination) is eventually upset by a great
discovery. One day, one of its inhabitants, Mr. Gleason, decided to have a
wall erected on top of a hill and began to work behind the wall in a com-
pletely mysterious way: none of the village inhabitants could see what was
happening beyond this barrier. A long time after his death, his widow had
the wall torn down and it was then that his fellow villagers realized that,
beyond that wall, Mr. Gleason had reproduced the village in miniature,
a really beautiful model in which the houses, streets, buildings and even
the inhabitants themselves were perfectly reproduced. If we accept Marc
Augé’s assumption that every place symbolizes the relationship of each of
its occupants with itself, with the other occupants and with their common
history (Augé 1994: 138), it can be easily gathered that Mr. Gleason, behind
his wall, has transformed his provincial village into a non-place which
does not symbolize identity or relationship, let alone its history, but only
a space translated into images and spectacularized (Augé 1994: 151). It is
no coincidence that first of all the wall and, later on, the miniature model
of the village are the cause of many troubles for the inhabitants. Indeed, if
the former obstructs the view of the landscape by casting a sinister shadow
over the village, the latter soon reveals itself as the cause of many personal
problems for the unfortunate villagers. As a matter of fact, when the roofs
of the houses are raised, the inhabitants also discover things that would
be better left unsaid, unseen. There is the exemplary case of a certain Mrs.
Cavanagh reproduced naked in the arms of a fiery young lover who is
undoubtedly not her husband. The initial pleasure at having a voyeuristic
peek at other people’s private lives soon gives way to the fear that one’s
own abyss might be discovered: «If Gleason knew about Mrs. Cavanagh
and Craigie Evans (and no one else had), what other things might he know?
[…] We gazed silently at the roofs and felt mistrustful and guilty» (Carey
1974: 110).
      Yet, even if the copy is all the more disturbing and problematic than
the original, the inhabitants of the small village, aware of its tourist po-
tential, decide not to destroy it. Then, on the death of the inventor, this
unusual idea begins to attract American journalists and investors, who
transform the model city and the real city into a sort of theme park. Ac-
cording to the decision of the minister of tourism, the «model town and
its model occupants were to be preserved» (Carey 1974: 110). By using a
passive construction and the term «occupants», the inhabitants are some-
how ‘stylized’ as prisoners of their own world. In addition, the American
visitors are not content to just look at the miniature model, but expect the


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inhabitants to pose exactly as Mr. Gleason had immortalized them, so that
a viewer could, with the help of a telescope, compare the original with the
copy. As Cornelia Schulze writes, the «look through the telescope symbol-
izes the process of colonization» (Schulze 2005: 124).
      From the very first lines of the story, the narrator, who is a young man
from the village and who recounts the story in the first person, tells us that
the village is happy but that all the inhabitants are obsessed with ‘Amer-
ican Dreams’. Obviously, they are not dreams of America, but dreams of
American consumerism, of possessing what America represents in their
fantasies: beautiful cars, bright cities, ways to escape from their provincial
lives. And it is precisely in line with the mirage of the American dollar that
the village is preserved. Indeed, groups of American tourists soon arrive,
eager to pay to photograph this theme park as well as be photographed
next to the originals of the model, close to the real characters. But, as time
passes, the model remains what it is, frozen in the eternal present of a non-
place, while the real characters age and die. The Americans cannot stand
it and get angry when, arriving in the village with the promise and the
claim to find the same real-life characters as in the model, they realize that
the copy does not have an identical correspondence. The mimetic plans
are reversed, and the community of citizens must continue to mimic the
small-scale reproduction of their world for American tourists, supporting
and suffering their look of reproach for having made the ‘mistake’ of aging
or not resembling the models enough.
      Carey shows the grotesque results of the attempt to imprison a cul-
tural identity in easy-to-use stereotypes, and the accusation, even before
being directed at the exploiters of this mechanism, is levelled at those same
compatriots who claim Australianness by birth, with their heads held high.
In fact, it all comes down to dreams borrowed from others and which have
submerged, cancelled, homologated or falsified dreams and authentic cul-
tures that are different from each other and in a constant evolution. Taking
a cue from the many references in the text to money, to the possibility of
earning and of economically exploiting the plastic model, and above all
to the Americans and their dollars, critics have significantly seen in the
village where the story is set an allegory of Australia, a provincial country
trying to ape the United States, or, rather, a former British colony wishing
to reproduce US neo-colonialism within its borders.
      To understand fully the course of Carey’s life, it is necessary to dwell
on this concept of ‘American Dreams’, and above all on the reason for this
geographical connotation attributed to the wishes of the inhabitants. Hav-
ing clarified that the adjective ‘American’ does not necessarily imply a topo-


                                                                                427
Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



graphical reference to the New World in general, or to the United States in
particular, it should be noted that America stands in the title of the story
and in the dreams of the characters as a sort of utopia. The same thing that
happens to Carey’s Australians had occurred to the Europeans with regard
to the new continent. Carey’s inhabitants soon realize this when the Amer-
icans come in droves with their dollars and their claims to transform the
village into a continuous show. Anticipating Marc Augé’s speculations by
nearly two decades, Mr. Gleason’s fellow citizens realize how disturbing a
place deprived of history might be, in which identity and relationships are
replaced by loneliness, similitude, and simulacra. Only the topicality and
urgency of the present moment count. Thus, the narrator reflects on the
Americans and their absurd needs in the epilogue of the story:

         The Americans would come, he said. They would visit our town
      in buses and in cars and on the train. […] They come looking for my
      father and ask him to stare at the gears of Dyer’s bicycle. […] He does
      what they ask. They push him this way and that and worry about the
      expression on his face which is no longer what it was. Then I know
      they will come to find me. […] I stand sullenly and try to look amused
      as I did once. Gleason saw me looking amused but I can no longer
      remember how it felt. I was looking at Brian Sparrow. But Brian is
      also tired. He finds it difficult to do his clownish antics and to the
      Americans his little act isn’t funny. They prefer the model. (Carey
      1974: 110-113)

      By saving the model, Mr. Gleason’s fellow citizens do not look to the
future with the prospect of building a new civitas in which utopia might
epitomize the true nature of the civilization of tomorrow, but they accept
to live by aping a fake, a reproduction, a simulacrum. In other words, they
agree to transform themselves from individuals to copies of copies.
      This makes American Dreams (and it will be much more so in The Un-
usual Life of Tristan Smith, 1994) an eccentric foray into Guy Debord’s theory
of the «society of the spectacle» and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum theory.
Debord defines the «society of the spectacle» in these terms:

         In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
      presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything
      that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. […]
      Reality arises in the show and the show is real. (Debord 1983: 5)




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                                     Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



      The conversion of reality into a show, a spectacle, takes the place of
religion. In the village of the story, everything has value only if it presents
itself as a show: people, places and events are evaluated on the basis of
their commercial value. And everything becomes a simulacrum: in fact,
according to Baudrillard, the «simulacrum is never what hides the truth
– it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true»
(Baudrillard 2008: 1).
      The reproduction of the town and its inhabitants fits perfectly with
Baudrillard’s thesis according to which postmodern culture is a universe of
signs detached from their point of contact, or rather, of signs that precede it
in the individual’s cognitive dimension. The consequence is the immersion
of society in a Hyperreality, a pseudo-reality generated by the simulation
of models which, however, lack a reference in the real world.
      In this connection, Baudrillard’s reference to Disneyland, which could
also be applied to Mr. Gleason’s model, sounds very interesting:

        Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of
     simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms. […]
     But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social
     microcosm, the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America, […]
     Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down
     to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its
     values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed
     and pacified. (Baudrillard 2008: 59-60)

      For Baudrillard, the breaking of the boundaries between simulacra
and reality generates an implosion of the social system in Hyperreality,
whereby the distinction between classes, political parties, cultural forms,
media and reality is loosened until it disappears. This is the situation of the
model, of the postmodern and dystopian city, which is also the place chosen
to become a stage on which we continue to celebrate the history of a culture
based on self-deception and illusion. According to Bill Ashcroft, however,
Carey’s simulacra ultimately take on a positive, politically connoted value.
For the postcolonial writer, the question of representation becomes a point
of critical reflection on the issue of power imbalances between hegemonic
and minority cultures, and political action is not necessarily inhibited by
simulation.
      Baudrillard conceives Hyperreality as a sociopolitical disaster, due to
the lack of any institutional foundation, and as a cultural disaster, due to
the transformation of the very concept of culture into an undifferentiat-



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Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



ed and unstoppable flow of images and signs, in which the simulacrum
supplants representation. In contrast, in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
as well as, in a certain sense, in American Dreams, Carey considers culture
itself as a theatre and the struggle for cultural dominance as a competition
between theatres, where no artistic identity enjoys a status of authenticity,
since it turns out to be founded on the emulation of a mediator situated
on a higher rung of the scale of exempla. Following Ashcroft, in his com-
mentary on Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the story represents
a point of conjunction between postmodern and postcolonial in his way of
dealing with the theme of simulation:

             In fact, the book situates itself at the juncture of the postmodern
          and the postcolonial in presenting two dimensions of simulation,
          a postmodern field of simulacra in which all meaning implodes
          and about which nothing can be done; and a postcolonial field of
          representation in which simulation and performativity become the
          strategies of cultural struggle. (Ashcroft 2005: 202)

      For Carey, cultural identity is a field of simulacra that try to impose
themselves on each other through performance, thus generating relation-
ships of power. Carey develops the discourse on simulation at various lev-
els, from linguistic to thematic ones, directing the reader’s attention to the
mechanisms and rules of representation, the function of disguise or the
change in status of an individual who was very different before becoming
a kind of actor.
      A quarter of a century after the publication of American Dreams, one
of the best-known English writers, Julian Barnes, in the novel England, En-
gland (1998)2, tells the story of an industrial magnate who transforms the


      2
       In its structure, the new novel is divided into three parts in chronological or-
der. The first one, “England” (23 pages), focuses on Martha Cochrane as a teenag-
er, fond of jigsaws, suspicious of religion and of the mechanisms of memory. The
second part, “England, England” (210 pages), is set in the near future and presents
a fantasy: media mogul Sir Jack Pitman and his associates (amongst them a cynical
and skeptical Martha approaching middle age) turn the Isle of Wight into a gigan-
tic theme park called “England, England”, in which one finds replicas of England’s
best known historical buildings, sites and figures. The Island Project is a great suc-
cess while the mainland suffers a vertiginous decline. The third part, “Anglia” (25
pages), takes place decades later when Martha, now an old and wiser woman, has
gone back to the former England, which has reverted to a pre-industrial era.


430
                                       Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



Isle of Wight into a theme park which reproduces the real England, start-
ing from an assumption according to which

        nowadays we prefer the replica to the original. We prefer the
     reproduction of the work of art to the work of art itself […] since
     the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can
     possess, colonize, reorder, find jouissance in, and, finally, if and when
     we decide, it is the reality which, since it is our destiny, we may meet,
     confront and destroy. (Barnes 1998: 53-55)

     Sir Jack Pitman’s theme park would be a sum of all the life-size English
tourist and cultural attractions, appropriately selected through a survey:
not a miniature England, therefore, but an “England, England”, a replica
truer than the truth, to the point of replacing the original, which is doomed
to an irreversible decline. One is reminded of Borges’s apologue “On Rigor
in Science”, in which a map – so detailed that it coincides in every aspect
with the territory it represents – ends up being abandoned to the elements,
revealing all its uselessness:

        In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that
     the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map
     of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable
     Maps did not satisfy, and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map
     of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided
     with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography,
     Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was
     Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies
     of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled
     Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals and Beggars;
     in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of
     Geography. (Borges 1964: 325)

      In Barnes’s narrative universe, the theme park thrives as a copy, while
the original decays. How we get to this is the subject of the novel. In other
words, how do you manage to present a fake in such an authentic way
that it might replace the real thing? Sir Pitman’s recipe is apparently banal:
magic must be added to the urgency of the present, to space and to the
perfect copy:

        ‘What we want,’ said Sir Jack, [...] ‘is magic. We want our Visitors to
     feel that they have passed through a mirror, that they have left their



                                                                                   431
Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



          own worlds and entered a new one, different yet strangely familiar,
          where things are not done as in other parts of the inhabited planet, but
          as if in a rare dream.’ (Barnes 1998: 120)

      Thus, if in Borges the life-size map is useless and is therefore aban-
doned precisely because it is nothing more than the cast of the world he
wants to represent, stripped down and reduced to its own cartographic
skeleton, in Barnes the theme park is rather a magical mirror of the real
world, and the visitor, totally similar to Alice in Wonderland, has to cross
it to simultaneously savour the dream dimension and its alienating famil-
iarity with reality. We have on the one hand an excessive scientific ratio-
nality – as suggested by the title “On the Rigor of Science” – and, on the
other, oneiric irrationality.
      However, in preparing to give shape to his own project, Pitman finds
himself having to deal with something objectively scientific: the idea of a
national history in whose representation a whole community can recog-
nize traces of its past. Since the Pitman Project is, above all, a marketing
operation, the images of that past should not only be easily identifiable,
but also predictable, i.e. stereotypes that, in the collective imagination,
constitute the quintessence of Englishness. These are places and monu-
ments (for example, the Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament or the white
cliffs of Dover); characters (from the Royal Family to Robin Hood, from
Shakespeare to Alice); ideologies (imperialism); habits (gardening, pubs,
shopping); and commonplaces (emotional frigidity, bad personal hygiene,
phlegm and snobbery)3. Translating them into a series of tourist attractions
means, first of all, dealing with a common historical legacy made up of
clichés, of names that have always been handed down but are now empty
of meaning; of dates learned by heart; of a past about which most English
people have vague ideas but which, for this very reason, they are ready
to mythicize. For Pitman and his followers, it is a question of recovering
– rather than creating – a common fictional encyclopedia for potential visi-
tors to “England! England!”. The theme park is a great fictional operation,


      3
        Sir Jack asks his Concept Developer to take an opinion poll on the «Top
fifty characteristics associated with the word England among prospective pur-
chasers of Quality Leisure. Serious targeting. I don’t want to hear about kids
and their favourite bands.» (Barnes 1998: 58) The polling takes place world-wide,
because the idea is to attract as many visitors from as many countries as possible.
The result is a heterogeneous list of fifty quintessences of Englishness. (Barnes
1998: 83-85).


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                                      Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



a fake world theoretically recreated; therefore, as happens to the reader of
fiction, in order to interpret it, the visitor

         has to reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the world’s
     encyclopedia. In other words, knowledge of the fictional encyclopedia
     is absolutely necessary for the reader to comprehend a fictional world.
     The actual-world encyclopedia might be useful, but it is by no means
     universally sufficient; for many fictional worlds it is misleading, it
     provides not comprehension but misreading. (Doležel 1988: 181)

     As with the reader of fiction, so for the park visitor the encyclopedia
of the current world could be useful, but not universally sufficient; indeed,
in some cases, it could even be misleading. Visitors, therefore, like readers,

        have to be ready to modify, supplement, or even discard the actual-
     world encyclopedia. As long as the reader reads, his/her knowledge
     expands by incorporating more and more fictional encyclopedias. The
     reader’s encyclopedia is one of those dynamic knowledge structures
     that must be able to change as a result of new experiences. (Doležel
     1988: 181)

      It is therefore as much for reasons of fictional economy as owing to
market considerations that Pitman and his team proceed to eliminate all
the less attractive characteristics, those not authentically English, such as,
for example, everything that can make one think of Scotland or Ireland.
They will fill the black holes of history with popular myths and legends
by inventing, if necessary, bogus mythologies that can embellish the past.
The construction of a commercial and marketable Englishness must indeed
deal with elusive memories, poor knowledge or distortions of history, but
it also inevitably leads to the invention of cultural traditions capable of
coming to terms with the present.
      For Barnes, telling its own history in the wrong way is part of the very
essence of a nation: in his novel he is forced to note with bitter irony that
the nation of England today is only told through falsified, distorted and
misunderstood stories. A country like England, in which the marketing of
tradition has become a form of tradition itself (as testified to by the count-
less pseudo-historical tourism traditions offered to London visitors), ends
up as a kind of Historyland – “England, England”, a historical oxymoron,
an original replica – but also as the objective proof that its most represen-
tative elements can be ridiculed by the British and foreigners alike, given



                                                                                  433
Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



their scale reduction into an area no bigger than the Isle of Wight. In Augé’s
words:

              Space offers a reference point to memory and, if it often disappoints
          it, it is because memories drift, travel and are themselves unfaithful.
          The day when space attacks memory by destroying its reference points
          to replace them with simulacra, nothing can hold back the memories:
          their flight accelerates, they move away without the hope of returning.
          (Augé 2000: 51; my translation)

      By replacing the community’s cultural reference points with their per-
fect simulacra, space attacks memory4: the country remembers a false sto-
ry; instead of recognizing the continuous evolution of its national identity,
it freezes it into false images, reworking a nostalgic past from the point of
view of the present. As Vera Nünning has observed, England, England does
not call into question the past existence of specific characters or events, but
man’s ability to know or faithfully represent history. Any attempt to build
yet another version of Englishness by resorting to the past is bound to lead
to another invented tradition, which serves above all to come to terms with
the present:

             The invention of a tradition is thus shown to be of essential
          importance for individuals and countries. Nonetheless, it is worth
          remembering what Barnes satirically illustrates over and over again,
          viz. that there is no ‘essence’ of Englishness, let alone a ‘quintessence’.
          Just like any other construction of past events, the invention of
          ‘Englishness’ is primarily a means of coming to terms with the present.
          (Nünning 2001: 73)

     In an interview given when England, England came out in Italy, Barnes
himself claimed that the main theme of the novel consisted in the com-
parison between the falsity of public life and the private sphere. And he
added that «usually what a country passes off as authentic or typical of its
own reality is invented, artfully constructed and falsified, distorted and
overturned, so much so that one lives in a world of replicas, simulacra and
fakes» (Albertazzi 2000: 60).


      4
       Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, artificial places of memory that substitute
the real memory which has vanished in modern culture, can be related to Augé’s
ideas as Augé himself refers to Nora’s concept.


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      Having ascertained through surveys and market investigations that,
«if given the option between an inconvenient ‘original’ or a convenient
replica, a high proportion of tourists would opt for the latter» (Barnes 1988:
181), Sir Jack Pitman constructs a world of fakes which presents itself as the
perfect depiction of the ‘supermodernity’ theorized by Augé and charac-
terized by an ‘excess of time’ (the events that have marked English history
have been assembled together and can be covered in an afternoon) and an
‘excess of space’ (all English history and culture are restricted to the perim-
eter of the island, making the shrinking of the planet of which Augé speaks
physically tangible). The result is that, as in Augé’s supermodernity, in the
Pitman theme park the acceleration of history and the narrowing of space
lead to the fluctuation of the collective reference points, catalyzing a ten-
dency to individualize paths and spectacularize reality. Spectacularization,
after all, is the watchword of Pitman and his acolytes, whose initiative is
first and foremost a «project of fictionalization», «an image of an image of
an image», a sequence of «bubbles of immanence» (Augé 1999: 112-113).
The latter expression (which Augé coined precisely with reference to theme
parks) looks at a fictional cosmology consisting of discernible signs and in
which one can recognize oneself, but which lacks in symbology. One must
relate to and interpret it only in relation to pre-established norms. That we
are faced with false cosmogonies is demonstrated by the confusion that
arises when, crossing the ever thinner boundary between illusion and re-
ality, some actors who impersonate historical figures of the past are com-
pletely identified with their roles, i.e. stealing from tourists, as happens
with Robin Hood and his cheerful brigade, or, in the case of the fake Dr
Johnson, impolitely harassing patrons in the pub.
      In Barnes’s universe, the abolition of the barriers between true and
false does not affect the Isle of Wight only. Old England too, the ‘real’ En-
gland renamed «Anglia» in the third part of the novel, which is neglected
by tourists and has regressed to a pre-industrial condition, is not exempt
from spectacularization and falsification. In this sense, the case of Jez Har-
ris, the prototype of the typical Anglia villager, is emblematic. Harris, «one
of the most convincing and devoted villagers» (Barnes 1998: 261) and the
narrator of atavistic stories and traditional legends, is in fact not a local
farmer but an American lawyer. He tells completely fictional stories that
he will never replace with the legends of the authentic folk tradition for the
very good reason that visitors prefer them to the ‘original’ (Barnes 1998:
244). Similarly, his fellow villagers will easily adapt by inventing local fes-
tivals to celebrate fake anniversaries. In both cases, not only is the copy
preferred to the original, but a supposed tradition is created without any


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Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



connection with the real past. From the falsification of the past we arrive at
its invention: if “England, England” is a codified fake, Anglia is the carica-
ture of a myth. Both reduced to non-places, they represent the awareness
that England’s past has been rebuilt, remodelled. And if the island is just a
‘bubble of immanence’, Anglia resembles those real English villages now
deserted by the natives and inhabited exclusively by commuters.
      Similarly, in American Dreams the inhabitants of the small Australian
village are trapped in the perfect representation that Gleason has forged
of them and their environment, perhaps precisely with the aim of distract-
ing them from dreams of metropolitan grandeur. But, as in Barnes, also in
Carey, tourist exploitation and spectacularization, instead of chasing away
American dreams, end up magnifying them, imposing the replica village
as a magical catalyst for earning dollars and launching business.
      The ‘new reality’ must, paradoxically, be perfect thanks to the exal-
tation of deception. It is no coincidence that, in both Barnes and Carey,
visitors prefer the copy to the original, and complain when the boundaries
between true and false are erased, as in the aforementioned instance of the
actor who plays Samuel Johnson in England, England, or in the case of the
narrator of American Dreams, too old when compared to his copy repro-
duced in the model town:

        The Americans pay one dollar for the right to take our photographs.
      Having paid the money, they are worried about being cheated. They
      spend their time being disappointed and I spend my time feeling
      guilty, that I have somehow let them down by growing older and
      sadder. (Carey 1974: 113)

      Both the theme park and the model town reproduce the ideal space
of those who, too accustomed to images, no longer know how to appreci-
ate reality or, alternatively, the postmodern world, which is reduced to a
succession of empty images and entirely spectacularized. That is a world
where things happen as in a dream.
      We could call this situation the Truman Show effect, referring to the
famous 1998 film by Australian director Peter Weir, in which the main
character unknowingly lives his own existence on a film set of a perfect
provincial town located, as in England, England, on a small island (Seahav-
en). He is constantly under the eyes of hundreds of cameras scattered all
over the place, in a sort of perpetual Big Brother atmosphere designed to
satisfy the voyeuristic tendencies of the television audience. Every gesture,
every act and feeling are fed to the crowd; every house, every street and


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tree are part of a studied set design. Although it has been interpreted al-
most unanimously by critics as an indictment against the excessive power
of the media, Weir’s film also and above all functions as a bitter and disen-
chanted representation of the global village, in which the clear distinction
between the observer and the observed disappears. That is, the distinction
between the gaze cast on the Other and the one that the Other sends back to
us, as both do not arise so much from a desire to look at, know or welcome
reality, but from an impulse to show and show oneself, in an incessant
representation in which the other is seen, at best, as a supporting actor. In
this game of gazes, reality, as in Barnes’s theme park or as in Carey’s mod-
els, boils down to a scenography for the performance of the self, an ego
that is itself a scene, an exhibition, a story. In the society of images, what is
important is not for life to be varied, interesting or adventurous, but that
life can be shown. Therefore, the boundary between life and the story of a
life, between reality and the image of reality, collapses. To be is to be there.
       Like Truman Burbank, Carey’s characters always have to confront
fictitious representations of the real world, to the point of living through
images rather than in reality, and thus risking being overwhelmed. Un-
intentional actors in the show of their lives, like Truman, they yearn for
the truth but, in spite of themselves, they live in a false world. Sir Jack
Pitman in England, England is also reminiscent of the deus ex machina of the
cinematographic story, i.e. Christof, the producer-demiurge and arbiter of
Truman’s destiny. Furthermore, these same performances need not only
stages (the plastic model or the theme park), but also spectators who are in
the know: the Americans who pay the ticket to be photographed with the
citizens reproduced in the Gleason model, the tourists who arrive in droves
from all over the world to the Isle of Wight to visit “England, England”.
It is no coincidence that all these narratives with a Truman Show effect, in
which what is described is a hyper-narrativization of reality, present open
endings: as long as there is an audience eager to cultivate the perversion of
the image, of the false and of the copy, without feeling any moral respon-
sibility, the show must go on.




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Biancamaria Rizzardi, The Truman Show Effect



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                                The Author
     Biancamaria Rizzardi

     Biancamaria Rizzardi is Full Professor of English Literature at the Uni-
versity of Pisa, where she teaches English Literature and Literatures of the
English-speaking Countries. Her areas of special expertise, and the fields
in which she has most frequently performed her research activities, are:
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Romantic and Late Romantic Poetry,
Victorian Poetry, Postcolonial Studies, Canadian-British Literary Compari-
sons, Canadian Poetry, Translation Studies. She is the editor of the Diagos-
fera series published by ETS, Pisa. Among her latest publications: Spots of
Time: Lectures on the English Literary Tradition (2019), “The Doctor’s Visit: As-
pects of Love Melancholy in Seventeenth-century England” (2019), “Nuovi
versi per Venere: Swinburne, Rossetti e i Preraffaelliti” (2020), “Traces of
Dante in Nineteenth Century English Poetry” (2022), “Orizzonti danteschi
contemporanei tra Occidente e Oriente” (2022).

     Email: biancamaria.rizzardi@unipi.it


                                The Article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022



                        How to cite this article
     Rizzardi, Biancamaria, “«We accept the reality of the world with which
we’re presented»: The Truman Show Effect”, Entering the Simulacra World,
Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovannelli - F. Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24
(2022): 423-439, www.betweenjournal.it


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