Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Time as Subjective Conception
In another example of temporal disintegration at the sanatorium Joseph meets his father at a restaurant for lunch. His father embarrasses him. Joseph flees and, despite a growing tiredness and a need to stop for naps, makes it back to their shared room at the sanatorium. There he finds his father in bed who tells Joseph that he has been in the room for two days without receiving any attention. The conclusion Joseph draws is that each person operates with an individualized sense of time:
How do I reconcile this? Has Father been sitting in the restaurant, driven there by an unhealthy greed, or has he been lying in bed feeling very ill? Are there two fathers? Nothing of the kind. The problem is the quick decomposition of time no longer watched with incessant vigilance.
We all know that time, this undisciplined element, holds itself within bounds but precariously, thanks to unceasing cultivation, meticulous care, and a continuous regulation and correction of its excesses. Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning. The incongruity of our private times becomes evident. My father’s time and my own no longer coincide.
The abandonment of a concept of shared or communal time represents Joseph’s surrender to the temporal logic of the world of the sanatorium. It is also an indication that the realm of the sanatorium is free from the type of temporal organization that governs life elsewhere. Elsewhere, time is structured not on its own, but through the vigilant attention of the organizer – both the community and the individual, though the latter is unalterably subordinate to the former. Elsewhere, time is not something to be felt or experienced, but to be understood, measured and accounted for. Time, in other words, is a foundational rational principle of social organization. The dream state breaks time’s hold on the individual consciousness by inverting the hierarchy between perception and reason, individual and community. The individual and the individual’s perception become the basis for a highly subjective “reality” of the dream state.
And yet, despite this liberating potential, the temporal aspects of the world of the sanatorium end up frightening or repulsing Joseph as much as aspects of its spatial realm. Why? Because “time” at the sanatorium is missing something – freshness. The abandonment of the progressive notion of time also means the abandonment of constant renewal, newness, and progress. Joseph laments:
I begin to regret the whole undertaking. Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality? Does anyone here get time at its full value, a true time, time cut off from a fresh bolt of cloth, smelling of newness and dye? Quite the contrary. It is used-up time, worn out by other people, a shabby time full of holes, like a sieve…. No wonder. It is time, as it were, regurgitated – if I may be forgiven the expression: secondhand time. Gold help us all!
Then Joseph makes the rousing appeal:
Sometimes one feels like banging the table and exclaiming, “Enough of this! Keep off time, time is untouchable, one must not provoke it! Isn’t it enough for you to have space? Space is for human beings, you can swing about in space, turn somersaults, fall down, jump from star to star. But for goodness’ sake, don’t tamper with time!”
In both a spatial and a temporal sense, the world of the sanatorium starts to turn on Joseph, precipitating his flight from the anarchy. While liberating, the chaotic and fundamentally subjective nature of time at the sanatorium becomes oppressive. It seems to Joseph random, unreliable and even menacing. Time, even more than space, makes the sanatorium a world without order, a world not governed by reason or communal definitions, a world passively experienced by the lone individual – a world out of control.
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