Roman à Clef
Dec. 15th, 2004 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsDoes this concept define real person slash in any way, shape, or form? I'm honestly curious.
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Roman à Clef
This term refers to a novel based on the lives of real people, but the names or other superficial details have been changed. If readers know the real-life situation, they have the key, so to speak (clef is "key" in French; roman means "novel"). Then they can tell who is supposed to be whom.
A true roman à clef might be a fictionalized but fairly accurate account. Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point includes characters who are closely based on D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry. In On the Road Jack Kerouac's characters resemble himself, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other friends. A variant of the form (which perhaps should be called a "false roman à clef") implies that it is based on the lives of real people, but is, in fact, wildly fictionalized. Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers adapts incidents to create a specious resemblance to the lives of Howard Hughes and Jane Russell.
Many novels have characters that come from real life, and some novels are extremely autobiographical, but a roman à clef usually means that the entire novel is dominated by its appropriation of an identifiable set of publicly recognizable figures. If you have lived among interesting and famous people, a roman à clef is a way to recreate them as fictional characters. That allows you freedoms of interpretation and invention not available to conventional biographers. It also might involve you in complex lawsuits about exploitation of a person's "commercial value," libel, and invasion of privacy.
See Novel, Realism.
*
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Roman à Clef
This term refers to a novel based on the lives of real people, but the names or other superficial details have been changed. If readers know the real-life situation, they have the key, so to speak (clef is "key" in French; roman means "novel"). Then they can tell who is supposed to be whom.
A true roman à clef might be a fictionalized but fairly accurate account. Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point includes characters who are closely based on D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry. In On the Road Jack Kerouac's characters resemble himself, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other friends. A variant of the form (which perhaps should be called a "false roman à clef") implies that it is based on the lives of real people, but is, in fact, wildly fictionalized. Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers adapts incidents to create a specious resemblance to the lives of Howard Hughes and Jane Russell.
Many novels have characters that come from real life, and some novels are extremely autobiographical, but a roman à clef usually means that the entire novel is dominated by its appropriation of an identifiable set of publicly recognizable figures. If you have lived among interesting and famous people, a roman à clef is a way to recreate them as fictional characters. That allows you freedoms of interpretation and invention not available to conventional biographers. It also might involve you in complex lawsuits about exploitation of a person's "commercial value," libel, and invasion of privacy.
See Novel, Realism.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 12:09 am (UTC)This may in practice be a difference that makes no difference and therefore *is* no difference, since the RPS websites are indeed generally careful to put that "this is fiction" note on the top.
More interestingly, most or at least many of RPS stories fall into recognizable slash styles. To a reader with any fan experience, they're obviously fannish stories instead of, say, journalistic interviews or a fan's accounts of meeting said celebrity. That is, the story's style and events are marked as fictional to the intended audience. It's not the same mechanism, but has the same effect as naming the heroine of a glamor novel about a 1950s-60s movie star with eight marriages, Elizabeth Baylor.
To non-fan readers, is that enough to make the stories "fictional" instead of fake "factual" accounts? The acceptability of RPS (to me, since the subject is very much debated) is that it's marked and known as fiction, however thoroughly accurate the scattered facts in it may be.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-17 01:43 am (UTC)"The acceptability of RPS . . . is very much debated" -- that would be the only thing about RPS that can't be argued, heh.