Real people often lurk behind the facade of fiction. Authors hide them for a variety of reasons.
If an author is poking fun at the foibles of his or her contemporaries, the author's deception may be necessary to avoid a lawsuit for libel, or -- if the author himself was involved in such foibles -- to avoid self-incrimination. Hiding real persons behind a fictional facade also is useful when one's writing is perhaps more autobiographical than one would care to admit.
Sometimes authors provide a key to help readers unravel their deceptions. Any such "novel with a key" is generally termed a roman à clef.
As Melissa Boyde points out in a recent article about the rise of the roman à clef, the term usually is only applied to
fictional works in which actual people or events can be identified by a knowing reader, typically a member of a coterie. Seventeenth century writer and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) is attributed as the innovator of the genre creating it to disguise from the general reader the public figures whose political actions and ideas formed the basis of her fictional narratives....
The clef, or key, is generally regarded as the roman à clef’s distinguishing feature. It may be published with the novel or subsequently by the author or through diaries and correspondence. Although the key is not always published openly some indication of the scope of a roman à clef’s concerns is usually evident in devices such as an epigraph or naming of characters and/or places. The key provides a ‘technique of matching [which] … unlocks the historical secret otherwise hidden behind the veil of fictionalised characters’ ... and thereby sets the roman à clef apart from novels which contain a fictionalised representation of a real-life character. The first roman à clef is generally considered to be de Scudéry’s second novel, Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus, published in ten volumes between 1649 and 1653. Speculation by readers that it was based on auto/biographical material no doubt contributed to its immense popularity and, perhaps to satisfy that curiosity, some years after the final volume of Cyrus a key was produced and published as an adjunct... [Note to Proust devotees -- Proust was a piker! Cyrus is far and away the longest French novel ever published ... some 400+ characters are introduced over the course of its 8000+ pages!]
As Boyde makes clear, the key to unraveling the real persons that are fictionalized in a roman à clef is frequently not obvious in modern versions of this type of novel. But trying to figure out "who is who?" seems to be part of the appeal for many book collectors who specialize in this sort of novel:
Of course, sometimes a little help may be necessary....
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