Key novel
A roman clef is a novel that suggests to be read as a true story. The name comes from the fact that it is possible to write "keys" to these novels, pages on which it is broken down who is actually meant by which people in the novel.
features
- A form of ambiguous speaking flourishes with the roman-clef: the roman-clef meets the requirements of a novel on the surface; his story has the charm of an invented story following the laws of novel art, but threatens to make statements about real people and facts without making clear where the boundaries between invention and truth should lie.
- The narrated stories can be read by a more or less broad public for secrets that the author reveals beneath the surface. The deciphering public can reduce itself to the author's circle of friends and those affected who rediscover their stories in this novel; However, it is also possible to have fiction books that come on the market with their keys and can thus be deciphered by the entire readership.
- As a rule, the novel with the clef allows the author, like those who become heroes in his novel, to withdraw from the claim that one is only reading one novel here. Seen in this way, the roman clef only produces open secrets , it ultimately leaves the explosive claim to others that what is published here is actually true.
- Romanesque keys offer authors effective protection against persecution if they can trust that neither those affected nor the prosecuting authorities want to provide evidence that what is depicted is true, i.e. not novel.
- Romanesque clefs can, but need not be, scandalous. In addition to scandalous key novels, which reveal private or public stories to the detriment of those affected, there are also key novels in which the groups or people shown celebrate each other. The spectrum ranges from panegyric , the praise of a ruler who can be discovered behind the novel's hero, to varieties of a key novel that creates fashion, in which elegant circles portray themselves and publicly exhibit their way of life.
history
The genre of the key novel is as old as the option of fictional spelling within literary history. A number of established novels such as John Barclays Argenis or the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry were, with the greatest self- image , novels in the clef . The genre had multiple advantages here: It allowed any stylization of real people: on the grounds of the heroic novel, they became oversized heroes. Praise that was hardly possible in the real historical gesture was still required in the field of the hero novel. At the same time, in the field of heroic novels, the roman-clef allowed historical personalities to be dismantled in any subtle way: in the novel, they necessarily acted as heroes subject to love and thus human weaknesses. In the political arena, authors of romanesque romances could at any time claim to have written only one novel. Proof that the stories were based on truth was left to the other side, who scandalized themselves with him.
In the course of the 17th century, a second production - in contrast to the great, lavishly stylized novels of great heroes and their adventures - penetrated the field: that of novellism . In the novella, short stories are told whose surprising course should teach a lesson. Novelas Exemplares had given Cervantes the title of his epoch-making collection in 1613. As a story that could be embedded in a larger context, the novella made a career in great novels in which it was told, in memoirs , in fictional collections of letters and in scandalous journals . With the novella in the middle of the 17th century, there was the perfect excuse to publish any true stories. Allegedly only the example was supposed to teach here, in fact the authors could speculate on a public that would above all wonder who was supposed to have contributed to these scandalous stories in real life. In the second half of the 17th century, the French-speaking market in the Netherlands developed into the main hub for the new goods, which to a large extent had the smell of the key novel.
In the 1690s, new key novels conquered the market in London and at the turn of the 18th century also in German-speaking countries: those of private urban scandals. Hamburg, Leipzig, Halle and Jena offered the new goods in German-speaking countries. It could flourish wherever the city provided a deciphering public and a group of fashionable people (such as students or the fashion elite of a large city like London or Hamburg), from whom the author of the private key novel could publish anonymously, was needed the group in which anyone could be the author and in which anyone could deny being the author in an emergency. As it became clear in the first decades of the 18th century, the public was hardly prepared for the local scandalous use of the novel. Above all, the censorship authorities monitored the religious literature for opinions that were not within the range permitted by the respective territory. Political writings were monitored with a far greater tolerance. Romaneses flourished in the political arena, there often with party protection; London's market here went virulent with the novels Delarivier Manley , Daniel Defoes and Jonathan Swift . The private key fiction, which also appeared largely anonymously - by a young lady in London or in Germany by students who hid themselves under names like Amaranthes , Melisso or LeContent - tended to cause private scandals. Christian Friedrich Hunold risked his life spectacularly with such alias Menantes in 1706 after his pseudonym was cleared and private individuals could take revenge on the author far more dangerously than politicians in the limelight. Moral reform was necessary here in the course of the 18th century. In the middle of the 18th century it took place in a countermovement to the romanesque keys. Their demands were:
- Novels that should be famous for their novel art, their "literary qualities",
- Novels that required interpretation rather than decoding,
- Novels with sensitive heroes instead of the previous " gallant " heroes who stood out especially in the scandal with a deliberately irresponsible conduite .
The reform of the novel, which began in the mid-18th century, had an impact on the way into the 19th century. " Autonomous works of art " became the goal of the novel, which gained rank as literature .
Modern literature
Regardless of this, the roman keystone experienced new high phases in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here the regimes of political oppression developed new conditions for the development of novels, which could be read by arbitrarily elitist and limited groups of readers with a deeper ideological agreement about the current system. The placement of the actions in a strange time remained popular, the use of genres that invited the imagination was added. In recent literature, current references were often hidden in fantasy or science fiction stories. In recent times, at least in Western literature, the roman clef has played a role especially when authors try to deal with taboo subjects, or when it comes to avoiding private claims by depicted persons or disguising biographical references.
The term roman clef is difficult to apply to modern literature, because even if an author incorporates real people and events in his works, he usually insists on having created a fictional work. This even applies to Klaus Mann's Mephisto . This work was not available in bookshops for many years because there was a legal ban due to violation of Gustaf Gründgens ' personal rights ( see in detail: Mephisto decision ). Nevertheless, Klaus Mann insisted that he had not written a roman-clef in the classic sense, since he was primarily concerned with political opportunism in art.
Well-known key novels in German literature include, in addition to the aforementioned Mephisto by Klaus Mann, Martin Walser's death of a critic . Truman Capote was ostracized by this very scene because of his last (unfinished) novel Answered Prayers , in which he describes scandalous stories from high society in only a few encrypted ways. As a typical "roman à clef of the Beatniks " applies Jack Kerouac On the Road (dt. On the way ).
In 2003 the distribution of novels by Alban Nikolai Herbst and Maxim Biller was banned because people recognized themselves in the characters in the fiction and felt that their personal rights were impaired.
See also
- Key person
- Prometheus, Deucalion and His Reviewers , Drama with Key References
literature
- Georg Schneider: The key literature . 3 vol. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1951–1953.
- Vol. 1: The overall literary picture.
- Vol. 2: Deciphering German novels and dramas.
- Vol. 3: Decoding of foreign novels and dramas.
- Olaf Simons: Marteau's Europe or The Novel Before It Became Literature . Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta 2001, ISBN 90-420-1226-9 .
- Gertrud Maria Rösch: Clavis scientiae. Studies on the relationship between factual and fictionality in the case of key literature . M. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-484-18170-2 .
- Gertrud Maria Rösch (ed.): Codes, ciphertext and encryption. Past and present of a cultural practice. Attempto, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-89308-368-5 .
- Johannes Franzen: Indiscreet Fictions. Theory and practice of the key novel 1960–2015. Wallstein, Göttingen 2018.