Saying Goodbye to Causality: Linear Gender Justice and the Path to the End in ›Buhlschaft auf dem Baume‹

Abstract

Following a discussion of David Hume’s and John L. Mackie’s theoretical positions, ›causality‹ is rejected as a literary category: attributions of causality to narrative texts usually remain individual speculations, not least since necessary and sufficient conditions, as well as the assumptions of regularity, cannot be reliably grasped. In ›Buhlschaft‹, the characters’ assumptions of causality are exposed to ridicule. Nevertheless, the text is led stringently, and also plausibly in axiological terms, to a conclusion in which the final success compensates the wife for her suffering at the beginning of the text. With the fiction of a voluntary, long-standing affair with St. Peter, she punishes the blind man for restricting her physical self-determination and avenges the torment he inflicted on her with the eisen halfter.