The Hand that signed the paper, Helen Darville - A varied hoax which put literature in question

Résumé du document

Helen Darville's literary hoax has been a start for a myriad of many-sided debates and still gives rise today to virulent theoretical, historical, political, aesthetic, moral and ethical discussions both because of its content and because of its eccentric author. The nature of the issues which have been raised by Helen Darville's book obviously not only concerns the literary field. The revelation that Helen Demidenko, who defined herself as " half Ukrainian" was in fact Helen Darville and has nothing to do with any Ukrainian family has broadened a debate which formerly dealt with the question of the contextual freedom of speech and of the implicit and explicit Anti-Semitism content contained in the novel, to a debate about the author's responsibility , the value and the function of fiction, and the rules which governed its relation with History. If the novelist obligations seem to be firstly aesthetic, the literary context of production of this novel, the Historical period it refers to, and the identity of its author lead to a debate which level exceeds the question to analyse whether the novel is " articulate, strong and well constructed" ( Serge Liberman, 1995) or poorly written and juvenile as it is considered by its detractors.

Extraits

[...] To my mind, the question is consequently to understand why The Hand That signed the paper is characteristic of a latent ( Australian) racism” more than to define in which terms Helen Darville is an Anti- Semite. A book can be anti-Semitic even if it was not the author explicit wish, in the same way the question is not to consider if whether of not literary merit and racism can co-exist in a same piece of art ( in any case Louis Ferdinand Céline has already answered The first controversy raised by the book was because of its presumed Anti-Semitic content. [...]

[...] The book of Helen Darville can not only been analysed in terms of a book of fiction because it has not been considered and defined as if by its author, and to ban the author intentions of meaning and effects wished on the public would mean to renounce to a fundamental part of its meaning. It is also impossible to my mind to study only The Hand that signed the paper as a literary product because of the historical events Helen Darville has chosen to deal with. The Holocaust, indeed, is more than a bloodshed, It is a genocide. [...]

[...] In this context, we have to bear in mind that the Vogel judges and the first innocent readers of the novel, have read the text as a testimony. There is no justification possible for Helen Demidenko when she says that she had to adopt a fake identity to speak about minorities or she would never have been published because her presumed familial link with the traumatizing event described in the novel has determined the way the novel has been perceived, and because some Australian people do have bought this book because they considered it as a testimony. [...]

[...] It would have been totally different if Helen Darville had presented her text as a work of fiction. The problem raised by the note which is as the beginning of the novel is that even if she defines her characters as fictional, she argues that her novel can not be considered as unhistorical” because it has been written according to real testimonies. This pernicious assertion is interesting considered with the original definition of the real History : the events were considered as true only if they were validated by the oral transmission. [...]

[...] To my mind, fiction could be a good way to speak about the unspeakable” in order to incite the reader through the distance and the identification to think about History, and about his or her own responsibility to the past. Nonetheless, the diminishment of the sense and the underestimation of the facts through language seems to me irreparable. Even the concept of truth is nowadays put in question. In this context, the question is not to reduce all the authors of fiction to distinguish for the reader in their work what is a universal truth or just a truth of the fictional text; the problem is also here more a question of context of production. [...]