Stephen Fishbach’s Reality-TV Novel Is More Reality TV Than Novel

The colonial travelogue was already a bloated genre by the time Jonathan Swift decided to poke fun at it in the 1720s. London publisher Richard Hakluyt began compiling folios of “true relations” penned by returning sailors as early as the 16th century. They had an episodic quality. Each chronicle was the latest installment in a serial that began in 1492 and extended indefinitely into the future. A full-bearded Englishman (or Dutchman, or Scotsman, or Frenchman) landed on shores where everything was unfamiliar. After trial and triumph, the hero returned home to tell the tale.

Except no hero could tell his tale alone. Any chronicle that wound up bound between fly-leaves was first selected by an editor and annotated by a small army of translators and censors. Part of the sport of reading a travelogue was to guess which fantastical claims were true, or at least true to the chronicler’s tale, and which were embellished by the folio’s editor.

Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels satirized this dynamic in 1726. In an introductory note, the narrator cursed his editors for their “infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating,” and accused “your printer” of mangling the text with falsehoods. “Do these miserable animals presume to think that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity?” Gulliver asked his readers, before his story even began.