During the mid-1990s the Australian literary scene was shaken by controversy over issues of antisemitism and Holocaust representation in Helen Demidenko's debut novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. In 2017, Darville reissued the novel. At a time when debate is raging over the nature and limits of freedom of expression and the status of words and facts, this was a provocative move. This article revisits The Hand in order to resolve the issues of literary antisemitism and freedom of speech that it raised in 1994 and continues to raise today. I apply Avishai Margalit's notion of an “ethics of memory” to the autofictional text in order to develop a theory of an “ethics of narration” in literary fiction. This narrative ethics enables distinctions to be made in relation to truth claims and fictionality, which were opaque in Demidenko's original autofiction and remain unresolved in the reissued version.
