The Dream Narratives of Debris

Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is this only superficial decoration: the body of the essay is often assembled from wide-ranging sources, which in their conjunction may form an idea quite different from any one of its components. The present essay is no exception to this rule. It assembles itself out of bits and pieces of Freud, Piaget, Lévi-Strauss and Baudrillard; and its examples are drawn from artists in various media: Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Gorey and Donald Barthelme. That debris (no disrespect is intended) is assembled here precisely in order to make a point about the ways that debris is assembled - the ways that, in the first instance, material residues give rise to certain narrative arrangements, which are never so thoroughly assembled that they escape from under the sign of debris. They have now been translated into mental debris, and as a consequence partake in the kinds of associative processes that also give rise to dreams. Narratologists have expended much effort in the attempt to lay out narrative's syntax. But the structuring principles of narrative may be more akin to those of the decorator crab than to those of the grammarian. Within the drowned world of debris, narrative and dream clasp hands.

Joseph Cornell supplies our first example of such an encounter. On April 15, 1946, he took time out from constructing his boxes of assembled objects to clean up his workspace. That night Cornell wrote in his diary: "Had satisfactory feeling about clearing up debris on cellar floor—'sweepings' represent all the rich crosscurrents ramifications etc that go into the boxes but which are not apparent (I feel at least) in the final result" (Cornell 128). While it is common enough for an artist to feel that the completed work has fallen short of the vision, it is less common for an artist to locate that vision in the work's material leftovers—in sweepings, debris, the residues of the day. "The residues of the day" is of course a phrase taken from a book that Cornell knew well and repeatedly cited, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. There Freud asserts that psychological residues of the preceding day are essential ingredients in the formation of dreams because they offer to the unconscious points of attachment through which its impulses may be manifested (562-64). The same thing can be asserted of Cornell's material version of the day's residues: points of attachment—or in Cornell's words "crosscurrents ramifications etc"—determined the way his boxes were assembled. Indeed, even before the assembling process began in that cellar workspace, the material brought with it a certain psychological freight. For Cornell's projects were often generated in the course of hunting expeditions among the junk shops of New York: his preliminary material was already residue even before it ended up on the cellar floor. And out of this residue of past days arose "impressions intriguingly diverse—that in order to hold fast one might assemble, assert, and arrange into a cabinet" (Cornell, quoted in Ratcliffe 46). Such an arranging of debris mimics not only the processes by which dreams are assembled but also those by which narratives are assembled, blurring the line between them.

A continuum between dream and narrative is outlined by Freud in his essay "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming." The continuum runs from dream to day-dream to play to creative writing—but, as we will see, it by no means runs only in one direction. If dreams are assembled from the residues of the day in order to express a wish fulfillment, then in this regard...