The Paratext as Narrative: Helen Darville’s Hoax, The Hand that Signed the Paper

Helen Darville’s first (and, to date, only) novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, was published in 1994 and details the lives of a fictional Ukrainian family in the Second World War. It also contains a frame story set in the 1990s, which depicts a young Australian woman, the fictional Fiona Kovalenko, worrying that her uncle and father may be tried for the war crimes detailed within the inner story. An Australian author of Scottish heritage, Darville published under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko. To support this fake name, she performed a fake authorial persona in real life, lying about her real name and ethnic background in public interviews.¹ Darville claimed she was of Ukrainian descent—a false claim which lent an element of authenticity to the Ukrainian subject matter of her fictional work. Although she never explicitly claimed the work as autobiography, she invited that association, never correcting the public narrative that there was an element of truth-through-heritage to her work.

This is an example of the autobiographical hoax, where an author invents and adopts a character persona and writes an autobiographical narrative from this perspective. It is usually seen as a fairly callous form of deception, since it often invokes the use of a fictionalized persona from a marginalized or disadvantaged group. Whether representing a race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, socioeconomic, or other minority, these personas supposedly give voice to those whose voices have traditionally been suppressed or silenced. If, upon revelation, the author turns out to be a member of the majority which has traditionally suppressed such voices, this ventriloquism is seen as just another oppressive injury.² The autobiographical hoax is thus one that usually invokes a strong negative reaction when the deceit finally comes to light. This is true in Darville’s case—a Scottish woman claiming the rights of a downtrodden ethnic group on the losing, and generally loathed, side of one of the biggest wars in recent times. She was given social leave to tell the story of those on the ‘wrong’ side of the war because of her claims of Ukrainian descent and authenticity, and the violation of that trust was seen as unforgivable.

The novel won critical praise, receiving the 1993 Vogel Literary Award, an Australian prize for an unpublished manuscript by a young author. The work was subsequently published and in 1995 won both the highly prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The content of the work itself was not without controversy, first causing a stir for its anti-Semitism—an apparent attempt to explain Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust by holding Soviets and Jews responsible for the Ukrainian famine (a retelling of history strongly refuted by historians). But the more explosive controversy was yet to come in the revelation that Darville was not, in fact, Ukrainian, and had been lying about this to the public. Her hoax was dramatically revealed in 1995 in a national newspaper, and the controversy scandalized both the literary world and Australian society alike.³ One could argue that her performance simply engaged fictionality in the paratextual space, and was not, then, a deliberate attempt to deceive. And yet her intent is beside the point: the public interpretation was that she had lied, that this was unacceptable, and that her fiction was tainted by her deception. Darville’s violation of the expectation of a certain level of truth in the public sphere was a violation of her relationship with her readers. In the context of Susan Stewart’s description of such transgressions as “inversions or negations of cultural rules,” it was a crime of writing (3). The purpose of this article is not to pronounce ethical judgments on Darville or her hoax, but instead to understand its mechanics, and to discern how it was that so many readers saw the novel as violating their trust in the author. In claiming authenticity, Darville raised the stakes of her work, heightening the impact when the hoax was revealed.

Interestingly, though, what separates this autobiographical hoax from [End Page...