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

Abstract

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 sup-