On the Novelle and/as Ereignis

This essay brings together the Novelle tradition with Martin Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie, composed between 1936 and 1938, even though at his request it was not published until after the appearance of his lectures (hence only in 1988). To the official title Heidegger added a parenthetical subtitle that invites this conjunction: (Vom Ereignis). The concern of Heidegger's late philosophy resonates with Goethe's famous question without the question mark, recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann - "Denn was ist eine Novelle als eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit" (Gespräche mit Goethe 221). Heidegger himself comments on the subtitle that he sees his work as a kind of thinking connected to a wider poetic tradition: "Die gemäße Überschrift lautet daher Vom Ereignis. Und das sagt nicht, daß davon und darüber berichtet werde, sondern will heißen: Vom Ereignis er-eignet ein denkerisch-sagendes Zugehören zum Seyn" (Beiträge 3). This resonance does not imply that Goethe meant with "sich ereignete" what Heidegger meant by "Ereignis," and also not that we should "apply" Heidegger to Goethe. But it can be considered a proposal to inquire whether some works of narrative fiction, Novellen, have at their core a nonsubjective experience or coming-to-appearance that Heidegger calls "das Ereignishafte des Seyns," which properly speaking cannot be "seen" and, from the perspective of the world in which it occurs or into which it enters, is "unheard of." Although Heidegger does not understand "Ereignis" as motivated by individual agents, humankind's partaking in the "denkerisch-sagendes Zugehören" does play itself out in the unfolding of a unique "Seynsgeschichte" that affects how the human being exists in the world. Since this unfolding is captured in the way creative works "bring forth" Being (poiesis), its "Bezug" to characters within, and to readers of, the Novelle will likewise have a special effect on them as it puts them in a simultaneously active and passive relation to the very condition or grounding ("Gründung") of their existence. Like Heidegger's own late thinking, the event in Novellen, and the Novelle text as event, are closely related to modalities of hearing and listening, and their associations with belonging - hören, zuhören, gehören, zugehören, and also horchen, gehorchen - modalities and associations that contrast markedly with the dominant visuality of the Enlightenment.

From a Heideggerian (post-Nietzschean) perspective the unheard-of event of the nineteenth century was the news of the death of God. Friedrich Nietzsche writes,

"Ist nicht die Größe dieser Tat zu groß für uns? Müssen wir nicht selber zu Göttern werden, um nur ihrer würdig zu erscheinen? Es gab nie eine größere Tat - und wer nun immer nach uns geboren wird, gehört um dieser Tat willen in eine höhere Geschichte, als alle Geschichte bisher war!" [. . .] "Dies ungeheure Ereignis ist noch unterwegs und wandert - es ist noch nicht bis zu den Ohren der Menschen gedrungen."

("Der tolle Mensch," Die fröhliche Wissenschaft §125)

It was still "unheard (of)" because it would take a long time for its echo to reverberate through modern culture, beginning with Ludwig Feuerbach, who can be considered the "first post-metaphysical" philosopher, and ending with twentieth-century nihilisms. It was an "event" not because it was some mere occurrence or happening within a chain we typically call "(intellectual) history" (i.e. not a Geschehen in Geschichte) but because it marked a transformative turn towards a new history of Being itself (the way John's logos did "in the beginning") or as Christ's coming is viewed by Paul. Alain Badiou says of the "Christ-event," "It is pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible. [. . .] The apostle, who declares an unheard-of possibility, one dependent on an eventual grace, properly speaking knows nothing" (45). The counter-event took place in the nineteenth century even though it is more accurate to say that the nineteenth century was merely the culmination of a longer story (see Smith, Dialogues). It was "news" in a unique way because in a world full of...