Lunch at the Sanatorium
Readers and listeners of Dispatches may remember my earlier plays ( here and here) upon the sanatorium scenes made famous in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Well my recent experience of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium ([2022] 2024) has me up the mountain again. Read on and, if you like, listen along . . .
My seminar for first-year university students —a kind of gateway to the humanities and social sciences— may not cure all ills. But this Winter it’s been helpful for greeting a particularly inclement world.
“Journeys & Stories” is the favourite of my courses of study by far. It’s like a conversation with an old friend. A dialogue that picks up where it left off, a path ever-opening onto fields of green and likely escapes.
Or perhaps the seminar is best thought of as an envelope into which I’ve long tossed what most intrigues and troubles me. Or maybe an old bookcase, beloved and untended, its contents, its contours, morphing, over time.
I want to tell you about the final, collaborative assignment in “Journeys & Stories” this year. I'll get to that. But only after I tell of just where we —my students and I— set off from, and of the waters we’ve sailed.
Different kinds of travellers have long set out, we intone, only to return home and tell of their adventures. If their experiences range often across great expanses of time and space, other journeys happen almost entirely in the mind and body. If we explore one thing repeatedly it’s memory. Followed closely (and relatedly) by the remembered riddles of childhood, and the human penchant for imagining possible futures.
We aspire to be “synoptic,” after William B. Taylor, endeavouring to remain critically curious about as many points of view as possible at any one time. Even as we recognise just how how impossible, how incomplete such an enterprise must remain.
And then there’s the ultimate inextricability of the “you” and “your” from the “them” and “their” as we face up to any journey and story. Make like Walter Benjamin or Italo Calvino, we cry: delve into the seemingly oddest of details —the things to which you're drawn— and do your delving before you know why, because you can't help it. Look at those things —let’s call them examples or case studies— as opportunities, and as illuminations you cannot, and would not want to, control. Don’t just explore your affinities and epiphanies, your curiosities and emphases. Bring them out to play.
What we study changes, but not its foundation in storytelling and orality. We pass through sagas and epic poetry, snatches of scripture and saints’ lives. We linger over folk- and fairy-tales, but also the close noticings and tellings of any number of flâneurs and rememberers-in-chief. The active adventurer, like the pilgrim and travel-writer are within our purview, but even moreso the passive adventurer, the one yearning, imagining from home. The emergence of the knight errant and the pícaro is only slightly less interesting than these figures’ metamorphoses and dynamic persistence into our own times. There’s the song-writer and the actor upon the stage, but also the “heroes” of the graphic novel and comic forms. And don’t forget the ethnographer before people, beliefs, lands, waters, and economies they struggle to describe. And the builder and rider of the trans-continental railways, and the science-fiction writer intent on revealing in story what’s all-too-nascent, all-too-telling about what’s coming next.
WORK TOGETHER in équipes of three. Invent and describe three characters, and and build a scene (a script to be performed), following this opening prompt:
IT IS LUNCHTIME in the Sanatorium Görbersdorf on a quiet mountainside in the Swiss Alps. It is the year 2148, and amidst other global challenges, a new pandemic is spreading. Anyone who can afford it seeks a healthy environment. There has been a revival of the early twentieth-century custom (then, in response to rampant tuberculosis) of coming to this region to take a "cure" in the pure mountain air. A bewilderingly international array of "guests" check in for what are meant to be temporary stays, until they recover. But it soon emerges not only that many guests are not"ill" but also that a number of "patients" never leave.
The curtain opens upon a tasteful (if bland) dining room, with windows overlooking a mountain valley. As servers scurry about with hard-boiled eggs and ceramic goblets of local beer, the head physician, Doctor Semperweiss, and his assistant —a man named Opitz— whisper at a corner table. Something has happened, but no one, apart from these two, are in the know.
Three people file in and take their seats, together, near the end of a longer table, reserved for guests.
One of the three, rubbing her eyes, is still waking from a long nap enjoyed beneath a thick duvet on the balcony just off her room. Before coming to lunch, she was looking over the village in the valley below. The face of another of the new arrivals at lunch is unusually pale, and stands out against his green cravat. He emits a weak cough at regular intervals, as if in time to some sanatorium soundtrack. He always seems about to fall asleep. The third of our lunch-seekers is talkative in the extreme, and also known to be a great walker on the paths up and down and all around the health resort. He is obsessed with footwear, and keeps looking to see what slippers or shoes others are wearing.*
With this opening prompt as your beginning, imagine the conversation that follows and what happens next.
Again, write your piece in the form of a script of a play, which you and your équipe will also perform in class.
Your written text may include dialogue, the brief description of characters, actions and settings, and stage directions, as appropriate for a theatrical script intended for performance.
Four Reminders, Considerations and Conditions:
Create roles/characters for each member of your équipe
Name and/or describe these characters and their backgrounds, contexts however you wish.
(You may also include Dr Semperweiss, Opitz, and/or any serving staff, or any other character, but there is no obligation to do so.)
Remember that "something has happened" (see the doctor and his assistant "whispering" above). You decide what, if anything, the other characters may know or suspect, and also whether or not this something gets revealed or plays any part in the conversation at lunch.
Remember, too, that not everything that matters has to be said out loud. Gestures and expressions are also communication. Silence, like suggestion, can be powerful.
4a, Incorporate at least five of the Words from we have gathered together this Winter semester, underlining them in your script.
4b. Cite any inspirations, whether directly quoted or not, as I have done just below (*)
* Our assignment prompt is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story ([2022] 2024), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, which itself plays upon Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain ([1924] 1927), translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. I am also grateful for suggestions from Professors Paul Christopher Johnson and Henry Cowles.