On the <i>Novelle</i> and/as <i>Ereignis</i>

Abstract

This essay brings together the Novelle tradition with Martin Heidegger's Bei- trage 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 phi- losophy resonates with Goethe's famous question without the question mark, recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann Denn was ist eine Novelle als eine ereignete, unerhorte Begebenheit (Gesprache mit Goethe 221). Heidegger him- self comments on the subtitle that he sees his work as a kind of thinking con- nected to a wider poetic tradition: Die gemase Uberschrift lautet daher Vom Ereignis. Und sagt nicht, davon und daruber berichtet werde, sondern will heisen: Vom er-eignet ein Zugehoren zum Seyn (Beitrage 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 Zuge- horen 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 cap- tured in the way creative worksbring 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 (Grundung) of their existence. Like Hei- degger's own late thinking, the event in Novellen ,a nd theNovelle text as event, are closely related to modalities of hearing and listening, and their associations with belonging - horen, zuhoren, gehoren, zugehoren, and also horchen, ge- horchen - 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,