The Roman à Clef

By Ignacio Zamorano
News Editor

It’s cliché by now to say reality is stranger than fiction. Nonetheless, the pages of this newspaper are a testament to how what occurs in our world can create compelling narratives. A roman à clef refers to narrative works that are based on real-life stories; they are identifiable by a select crowd despite their use of a fictional façade (e.g., names) to accommodate the author, which it does for a plethora of reasons. Seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry is attributed with its creation; she wrote thinly veiled satires of her prominent contemporaries. The distinctive characteristic of the roman à clef is its clef. Whether explicitly present in the work—a table showing which real person is represented by a certain fictional character—or implicit (represented through epigraphs, or by providing hints with the naming of characters, among others), these works are unique in that they provide certain readers with the opportunity to unlock the secret and identify the real characters through the aforementioned elements. For instance, a notable early roman à clef is de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus, published in ten volumes between 1649 and 1653. The readers’ belief that it had an autobiographical element fuelled its success; some years after the final volume of Cyrus, a key was produced, satisfying the public’s curiosity about the real people portrayed in her novel.

Having written certain pseudonymous short stories within this genre myself in this paper’s literature section since the last school year, I can attest to how the genre serves as a valuable niche, crafting compelling narratives while not demanding fully fictional worldbuilding. Early on, I decided to fully remain within the constraints of reality regarding dialogue; I never made up as much as a single line of dialogue. This commitment to realism through the use of my recollections of real events was steadfast, only running into the constraint of sometimes having to condense these stories to make stringent print word counts. Over the summer, I took on a months-long endeavour to write the magnum opus of this roman à clef collection; nevertheless, as publishing drew closer, I did realize that, for the first time, I was alarmed about ruffling too many feathers I didn’t want ruffled—these stories always ruffled feathers since reality doesn’t breed hagiographies— with it. As I pondered the costs of publishing, which would’ve only been viable had I departed from precedent and softened reality, I decided that it was best to scrap the finished story. It speaks to how recognizably real these stories have been that only rarely, in the mouths of shameless individuals, has the veracity of the events portrayed in the stories been questioned. Paradoxically, I do recall how only one individual ever actively wanted to be written about; only a few days later, they would read a pre-written story of mine about them and have the most viscerally negative reaction that any of my subjects ever had to being portrayed in a story. I’d like to thank Sophia, Jaida, and Olivia for providing me a worthwhile canvas in the pages of this newspaper, and a friend for his willingness to be the first reader of practically every story—from the first story onwards—and for his refusal to place any constraints on the contents of them. As Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda once wrote, confieso que he vivido.