Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

In 1937 Bruno Schulz published his second, and last, collection of short stories, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In 1942 he was murdered by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz Ghetto and the novel he was writing at the time, The Messiah, has never been found. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass was not translated into English until the late seventies, by Celina Wieniewska who had earlier translated The Street of the Crocodiles. In her introduction to the latter, she describes trying to explain Schulz “in terms of one literary theory or another” as “well nigh impossible.”

While this may be true, the title story of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is a masterpiece of short fiction. Inspired, as many of his stories seem to have been, by his relationship with his father, it concerns the visit by a son, Joseph, to his father who is residing in a sanatorium. When he asks if his father is alive, the doctor replies:

“Yes, of course… That is, within the limits imposed by the situation… You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.”

In fact, the town the sanatorium overlooks (where his father, far from being confined to his bed, has opened a shop) is like a shadowy version of reality where “the mournful semidarkness of an undefined time descended from a sky of indeterminable greyness” and the market square has a “strange, misleading resemblance” to their hometown. The sense of unreality is intensified by the fragmentation of time – one moment Jospeh meets his father in a restaurant in town, the next he returns to the sanatorium to discover his father in bed, complaining, “I have been lying here for two days without any attention.”

“The problem is the quick decomposition of time no longer watched with incessant vigilance.”

Though he answers the question, “Are there two fathers?” in the negative, in one sense there are as in the shop he “displays an energetic activity” whereas in the sanatorium he is “very sick”. This might be seen as Schulz’s version of memory, but, as with many of his stories, the workings of the mind become the fabric of the setting.

‘Dead Season’ also features a father and a shop, a “place of eternal anguish and torment.” At one point the father transforms into a fly:

“… a monstrous, hairy steel blue horsefly, furiously circling and knocking blindly against the walls of the shop.”

The transformation is not permanent and the story ends, as most of them do, in mystery and ambiguity after the arrival of a “distinguished visitor” whom the narrator spots wrestling with his father in his bed. In the final story, ‘Father’s Last Escape’ we also see the father transformed into “a crab or large scorpion”:

“Running on wavy jerks on his many legs, he reached the wall and, before we could stop him, ran lightly up it, not pausing anywhere.”

When he is finally caught, the mother cooks him but the family refuse to eat him. (It may be significant that Schulz was a translator of Kafka).

The longest story in the collection, ‘Spring’, revisits childhood, the spring of life. Written in an overblown style, it tells of the narrator’s admiration for the emperor Franz Joseph, and the adventures on which his imagination takes him, many of which originate in a friend’s stamp album which he regards as “a universal book, a compendium of knowledge about everything human”. Even his love for Bianca is understood via the stamp album:

“Bianca, enchanting Bianca is a mystery to me. I study her with obstinacy, passion and despair – with the stamp album as my textbook.”

Schulz allows the reader no demarcation between reality and fantasy and the adventure becomes more ornate as the story progresses. In fact, Schulz’s great skill as a storyteller lies in a refusal to acknowledge the dividing line between physical reality and our mental state and this is what makes him such a fascinating writer.

Tags: 1937 club, bruno schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass