Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Dream Beings
Unlike Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Schulz’s story contains only characters of everyday life: a chambermaid, a doctor, his father, shop assistants, customers, soldiers, a train conductor, and so on. Yet, these ordinary characters do not fulfill their expected functions. The doctor does not treat patients, the chambermaid does not clean. The character of Joseph’s father is particularly interesting, as he displays two completing opposing natures. On one hand, he is a dying man – in fact, as the doctor tells us, he is already dead but doesn’t know it. On the other hand, he is amazingly vivacious and, at times, frenzied. Joseph ponders this duel nature, but does not try to push it to the logical conclusion that the two states are mutually exclusive and thus the character of his father cannot exist as it seems, a realization which would call into question the reality of the world of the sanatorium.
The most disturbing and perplexing character in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” is the dog-man Joseph meets near the end of the story. He is a shape-shifter whose appearance removes all doubt that this world is a surreal one, a world of both ordinary and mythological – a dream world. Joseph’s confrontation with this dog/man is worth quoting in full.
I have never before seen the beast from so near, and only now did I see him clearly. How great is the power of prejudice! How powerful the hold of fear! How blind had I been! It was not a dog, it was a man. A chained man, whom, by a simplifying metaphoric wholesale error, I had taken for a dog. I don’t want to be misunderstood. He was a dog, certainly, but a dog in human shape. The quality of a dog is an inner quality and can be manifested in human as in animal shape. He who was standing in front of me in the entrance to the arbor, his jaws wide open, his teeth bared in a terrible growl, was a man of middle height, with a black beard. His face was yellow, bony; his eyes were black, evil, and unhappy. Judging by his black suit and the shape of his beard, one might take him for an intellectual or scholar. He might have been Dr. Gotard’s unsuccessful elder brother. But that first impression was false. The large hands stained with glue, the two brutal and cynical furrows running down from his nostrils and disappearing into his beard, the vulgar horizontal wrinkles on the low forehead quickly dispelled that first impression. He looked more like a bookbinder, a tub-thumper, a vocal party – a violent man, given to dark, sudden passions. And it was this – the passionate depth, the convulsive bristling of all his fibers, the mad fury of his barking when the end of a stick was pointed at him – that made him a hundred per cent dog.
After Joseph frees the dog-man from his chain, the latter becomes extremely submissive. Joseph longs to free himself from the company of this beast but cannot manage it. Eventually, he devises the plan to lead him up to his father’s bedroom and claim that he is going out for some brandy. The dog-man reluctantly agrees to stay – and Joseph makes a break for the train, leaving the deceived and furious beast there for his father to find upon his return. In the dog-man, all aspects of the dream world seem to converge: darkness, dirtiness, a blend of the ordinary with the bizarre, and the steady increase in fear and anxiety, both in general and more specifically in relation to the figure of the father and his fate.
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