The End in Things: MacGuffins in the Pre-Modern Exempla of Confession

Abstract

›Finality‹ is the MacGuffin of narratology. In the form of a linear, causally comprehensible course of events, it draws the reader’s attention to a corpus delicti, a conclusive object which does not harbour the solution to the narrated case, but is, at best, a secondary motif in a more complex reformulation of the problem. Using two exempla of confession from the Swiss collection of short stories and one from Jörg Wickram’s ›Rollwagenbüchlein‹, it becomes evident that the problem does not lie in the realm of narrative fiction, but in the mediality of a paradoxical act of speech, the performance of which creates intangible facts (or non-facts) that can only be verbalised in parable. Regarding the question of the finality of exemplary speech in pre-modern epic poetry, the confessio represents an experimentum crucis not only for narrative theory, but also for the sociology of self-care.