Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

October 27, 2008

By Gabrielle Matthews

Dr. Philip Kafalas wants to know how people dream.  Kafalas, Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, studies how and why citizens of 16th and 17th century China used their dreams in literature.

"I want to know what people actually dream," he says.  But his studies on how people write about these dreams are equally important.  By writing about a circumstance, thought or idea through the lens of a dream, an author can separate himself from a potentially dangerous or uncomfortable situation. In a politically volatile time, such as the fall of the Ming dynasty to the Manchus in 1644, this can be a useful rhetorical device. While a scholar may find it difficult to disparage a government openly, by framing his criticism as a dream, he can make his thoughts known just the same.

 "Writing about dreams can be a way of putting something out there, indirectly, but expressing it nonetheless," Kafalas says. "You can get at [an idea] through implication.  It's a flexible trope."

Kafalas' work at Georgetown, as a professor and a researcher, centers on how psychology relates to Chinese literature—his work on both dreams and the memories of dreams and how they are used as a method of indirectly transmitting thoughts and opinions come into play in his classes as well as his own writing.

Kafalas' classes are cutting edge—his seminars at Georgetown often inform his research almost as much as his research informs his classes. His "Chinese Literary Dream Texts" seminar explores Classical Chinese texts that recount or interpret dreams or use dreams as framing devices.  This seminar, as well as his most recent book, published in 2007, "In Limpid Dream: Nostalgia and Zhang Dai's Reminiscences of the Ming," helped lead him into his current research about dream texts. "In Limpid Dream" studies the 123 short essays the scholar Zhang Dai wrote about his life before the Ming dynasty fell to the Manchus. These snippets are presented as remembrances of the past, through the dream trope—using the dream as a metaphor for the insubstantial nature of that past.

In his book, for example, Kafalas writes that Zhang Dai begins his Dream Reminiscences with "an unmistakable image of the glorious early Ming"—this in itself is surprising as this writing was done early in the Manchu reign after a brutal takeover. Many members of the former dynasty took their own lives rather than submit to the new power. Zhang Dai "demonstrates that his remembered Ming self is structured by the same moral reverence," which enables him to convey meaning about his relationships to public concerns through a remembered—and therefore politically tinged—ceremony of visiting the Ming imperial tombs in Nanjing. Of course, Zhang's writing is certainly more complicated than just black and white metaphors: each piece of writing has multiple possible meanings and layers, and Kafalas treats each of the short essays with due sensitivity as he explores the dissimilar ways Zhang uses the dream trope, and how he understands the idea of self.

"In Chinese tradition when you wrote about yourself you did in it small forms, either in essays or memoirs, not like St. Augustine," Kafalas explains. "The most common form was in essay-like chunks modeled on historical biography, not on very long, official histories."

Many of the texts Kafalas is currently studying tend to be very short and interspersed among a great deal of other information. This makes the research time intensive and relevant sources difficult to track down. This research has taken him to China, as well as many libraries in the U.S., and leads him to many types and genres of writing. Some of his best sources, he says, are called biji, notebooks of personal anecdotes with no particular set form.

"Kind of like a blog," he laughs.

Diaries, as well, he says, are another good source, but the genre was not an especially popular one. He is interested in how these recordings, or thoughts presented as dreams, are an examination of interior life of Chinese people.

"People started recording dreams in first-person prose long before the period I am researching," he says. "Probably in the Song dynasty—about the 11th century—are the first."
           
Kafalas has been studying the language of personal discourse for more than 20 years. In the summer of 2008, he continued his research as he collected personal accounts of dreams.  Not only does he study dreams, Kafalas takes his research one step further.
   
"I want to teach myself how to read nonfiction prose," Kafalas says. "Studying English literature we read essays, but we don't think about conventions or construction. The essay is called the great transparent genre: In Chinese it is similar, though tied to the exam system [of bureaucratic training in Classical China]. Now we read them as sources of data, culture and history. I want to read these personal accounts, this nonfiction prose, as literary texts."

This is a fairly new idea, as literary critics and researchers like Kafalas read what can be termed "historic documents" though the lens of literature—like fiction. Both these prose sources, as well as fiction and poetry, are able to give researchers like Kafalas insight to the inner workings of societies and the mindset of writers.

"When we read poetry, we ask first 'how does this work?'" Kafalas says. “We should do the same with nonfiction prose."

Kafalas knows there is more research to be done on the "poetics of personal prose” as he terms it. "It was so common," he says, "but I don't feel I understand yet why it was so pervasive―I'm still snooping around."

Print Article