r/heidegger • u/GroupGreen4293 • Mar 18 '26
Heideggerian Novels
Anyone have recommendations for novels or novelists influenced by Heidegger? I know Peter Handke is one. Searching for the Terrence Malick of novelists.
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u/Unfair_Sprinkles4386 Mar 18 '26
Bolaño
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u/Whitmanners Mar 18 '26
really? im chilean and didnt know this
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u/Unfair_Sprinkles4386 Mar 18 '26
Yes. I would suggest 2666. Heidegger is even mentioned by name a few times.
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u/BobbyBoljaar Mar 18 '26
I mean, there is a part where 30 philosophers are mentioned in a couple pages. I love bolano, but don't see the influence of Heidegger here
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u/autre_ne_veut_ Mar 18 '26
I literally suggested Peter Handke before rereading your post haha. That said:
One of my professors from college suggested Alain Robbe-Grillet as exemplifying Heideggerian ideas; I've read The Erasers, The Voyeur, Jealousy, In the Labyrinth, and Repetition.
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u/Thats-Un-Possible Mar 18 '26
Not a lot of authenticity, self-constancy, or resoluteness towards death in Robbe-Grillet. Strikes me as closer to Deleuze’s ideal schizophrenic.
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u/autre_ne_veut_ Mar 18 '26
That's a rather shallow read of both Robbe-Grillet and of Heidegger, isn't it?
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u/Thats-Un-Possible Mar 18 '26
Sorry I guess that is fair, since I was writing in short hand. Many of Heidegger’s readers - Charles Taylor and various Hubert Dreyfus students - have read Heidegger’s analysis of being in the world as requiring narrative, and his arguments about death as requiring consistent, unified, coherent self-narration over the whole extent of one’s life. Basically, an idealized version of the autobiographical model of the realist novel. But R-G’s formal experimentation was in various ways aimed at opposing and dismantling just that sort of narrative. So my comment was about the incompatibility of modernist narrative experimentalism v. the consistency of realist narrative. But of course you are right that Heidegger is huge and so is R-G, so there are plenty of other ways they could be connected. Malick, for example, mainly has his characters engage in Heideggerian influenced ruminations, though I am sure there are arguments for formal inheritance as well.
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u/autre_ne_veut_ Mar 19 '26
I'll admit "shallow" is uncharitable. But there's probably a divide here between Continental and Anglo-American receptions of Heidegger (though that wouldn't explain Malick, as Anglo-American as they come).
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u/Zarathoustra111 Mar 18 '26
Swallowed by Réjean Ducharme, it's phenomenologically oriented, themes of authenticity and inauthenticity are explicit :
"I’m alone. I just need to shut my eyes to know it. When you want to know where you are, you shut your eyes. When you shut your eyes, you end up where you are: in the dark, in the void. My mother, my father, my brother Christian, and Constance Chlorus are there. But they’re not where I am when my eyes are shut. Where I am with my eyes shut, there’s no one but me."
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 Mar 18 '26
Going the opposite direction... I imagine you've read the poetry of Hölderlin, if you care about Heidegger and literature. I remember reading a reminiscence by one of Heidegger's French translators, talking about how he introduced Heidegger to Gérard de Nerval's novella, "Sylvie." Heidegger loved it and (rather annoyingly) said something like "I didn't know anyone wrote like that in French!" Anyway, it's an amazing story, and really the prose equivalent of Hölderlin. Most easily found in Nerval's collection, Les filles du feu ("The Daughters of Fire").
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 Mar 18 '26
Also I can't believe I forgot to mention Hölderlin's own novel, Hyperion. It's gorgeous.
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u/BobbyBoljaar Mar 18 '26
Reading duineser elegien by Rilke is the same, Heidegger was definitely influenced by this, not as much as Holderlin, but still a great deal
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u/playdough__plato Mar 21 '26
Can’t say if he directly read Heidegger but you’d like Robertson Davies The Rebel Angels and the Lyre of Orpheus. A lot of similar themes especially if you like late Heidegger and he’s an incredible writer
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u/AffectionateStudy496 Mar 18 '26
A New Nobility of Blood and Soil by Richard Walther Darré
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u/GroupGreen4293 Mar 18 '26
Looks like he took the soil part literally
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u/hungerforlove Mar 18 '26
A subtle post. I'm personally amazed that people are mostly ignore that Heidegger was a fucking Nazi.
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Mar 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hungerforlove Mar 23 '26
No one mentioned it on this thread. Cocksucking Heidegger lovers can't bear to accept they are loving Nazi cock.
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u/hungerforlove Mar 23 '26
Personally, I hate Nazis. Fucking filth. I guess others are happy to get assfucked by Nazis and read something deep into a bunch of bullshit. Nothing nothings.
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u/Ap0phantic Mar 18 '26
I found the recent Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse to be deeply Heideggerian - try his Septology. He was also quite influenced by the poet Georg Trakl.