The Unstable Liminal in Carlos Castaneda’s Genre Ambiguous Works

Robert von der Osten

As theorists of the fantastic become increasingly intrigued by the disruption of categorical boundaries (Graham), the dissolution of genre distinctions (Freedman), and the power of the liminal fantastic (Mendlesohn), the series of works by Carlos Castaneda about the teachings of the Yaqui “sorcerer” Don Juan seem to merit closer critical attention. These works offer a complex doubled liminal structure. Presented supposedly as the result of an anthropological field study, the works hesitate between the genres of non-fiction and fiction, between the occult and the marvelous. Within the works themselves, there is an equally complicated threefold equipoise on the status of the fantastic events among the occult, uncanny, and marvelous which both sustains and undercuts the surrounding non-fiction/fiction boundary. Since a number of writers would like to read Castaneda’s work as offering a post-modern liberation, a fundamental question is whether or not this balancing act is sustained. Mostly I think the structure, while making important demands on the reader, finally collapses and as it does so mostly undercuts the postmodern reading of the works.

For those not familiar with Carlos Castaneda, he is a rather mysterious author who claimed to initiate, as part of his anthropological work at UCLA, a field study which evolved into an apprenticeship to Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer. His series of works which started with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, copyrighted first as a 1969 publication by the Regents of the University of California, included in the end eight books reporting on his experiences as Don Juan’s apprentice, offering a vivid description of rather marvelous experiences and an alternative ontology which was supposedly presented by Don Juan. These works were a counter-cultural hit in the 1970’s, drawing, as they did, on a nativist shamanism, involving the use of psychotropic drugs, offering vivid descriptions of psychedelic and fantastic experiences, providing alternative lifestyle advice, and proposing a complex occult ontology. Most of all these were works about consciousness and awareness in an age supersaturated with the mystique of consciousness. Further, the work tied in nicely with the period’s fascination with the fantastic and the occult as part of a liberation from a totalizing rationality (Murray 172).

Because of the emphasis in Don Juan’s teachings on “seeing” and especially alternative ways of perceiving, stressing the ways which our perceptions of the world are habituated constructions based on social conditioning, a number of critics have wanted to place Castaneda in the post-modern vanguard. This is no more evident of this than in the author Ronald Sukenick’s 1973 review in the Village Voice.

Once philosophy was stories, religion was stories, wisdom books were stories, but now that fiction is held to be a form of lying, even by literary sophisticates, we are without persuasive wisdom, religion or philosophy. Don Juan shows us that we live in fictions, and that we live best when we know how to master the art….The sorcerer, the artist, sees beyond any particular form fiction may take to the Active power itself, and in the absence of powerful fictions in our lives, maybe it’s time for all of us to become sorcerers (Noel, Tales of Fictive Power, 117).

Daniel C. Noel, once an advocate for Castaneda who later becomes significantly disillusioned, suggests that insofar as Don Juan initiates Castaneda into the “mysteries of Active power,” “the reader, too, can become an apprentice. And this further means that ancient wisdom, including an ancient regard for dreaming as a separate reality and occasion for learning turns out to be taught by modern means- ‘The novel’s sophisticated techniques’ -to readers who, if attentive, are thereby effectively postmodernized” (Noel 133). Perhaps the works would seem most postmodern in the multiple seemingly deconstructive liminality of the work, both along the boundaries of non-fiction and fiction, as well as in the internal ambiguity of the fantastic represented within the work. The question is whether this is adequately sustained. I fear it is not.

The unavoidable dilemma of the works resides in their defined genre. For a long time, book stores seemed to have little idea of where to put the texts, shifting them from anthropology, to occult, to fiction, and back again, currently settling on the rather non­descript category of “New Age.” Theodore Sturgeon even included one of the books in an omnibus review of new science fiction (Oates 10). There are a number of external trappings that attempt to support the non-fictional reading of the texts. For example, in the front piece of Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan the publishers quote Paul Riesman’s review in the New York Times Book Review that “Taken together, they form a work which is among the best that the science of anthropology has produced.” In rare interviews, Castaneda sustained the claim of the non-fictional quality of the works, even ascribing his writing techniques to Don Juan’s teachings and to the use of his field notes (Noel). In the newest edition to The Teachings of Don Juan Castaneda in “The Author’s Commentaries on the Occasion of the Thirtieth Year of Publication” re-affirms the supposed basis of the work in his actual apprenticeship with Don Juan and thanks identifiable professors for interesting him in this work as ways of reclaiming such cultural field data “before enormous and complex areas of knowledge attained by cultures in decline would be lost forever under the impact of modern technology and philosophical drives.” (The Teachings of Don Juan xi). The Foreword by Walter Goldschmidt and Castaneda’s original Introduction all assert the “anthropological” origin of the work. The framework is consistent enough that Joyce Carol Oates took the works as accurate field reporting until Tales of Power, the fourth book of the series, in which Castaneda describes jumping into a canyon and entering an ‘alternate reality’ at which point Ms. Oates decided that the works were fantasy and not fact (Olson 48).

There is equally an extensive amount of internal support for the “non-fictional” reading of the texts, including Castaneda’s constant reference to his field notes and the reconstruction of the texts from these notes, and the ongoing academic attempt to build categorical scaffolding for Castaneda’s experiences and Don Juan’s often arcane explanations. Equally important is Castaneda’s role as a resistant narrator who represents “the West’s commitment to rationalism and the reality that rationalism gives us” (Oates 10). Through out the texts, Castaneda represents the rationalist resistance to the fantastic experience or occult explanation by Don Juan, stressing as he does in Journey to Ixtlan “I refused to believe what I was witnessing. The incongruence of my two versions of reality made me grapple for any kind of explanation. It occurred to me that it was perfectly possible that I had slept so soundly that don Juan might have carried me on his back to another place without waking me” (130). Of course, this narrative structure is extremely clever, since it represents the resistance of the reader and then offers such an implausible rational explanation that it forces the reader back on don Juan’s account. Indeed, the series of introductions to the texts reveal a gradual but reluctant surrender to don Juan’s vision of the world. In the Introduction to A Separate Reality, the second book in the series, Castaneda is still resistant- “I can say now, with the perspective of the five years that have elapsed, that at that time don Juan’s teachings had begun to pose a serious threat to my “idea of the world.” I had begun to lose the certainty, which all of us have, that the reality of everyday life is something we can take for granted” (7). By Journey to Ixtlan, the third book, the transformation into don Juan’s world has become complete, “The termination of the apprenticeship meant that I had learned a new description of the world in a convincing and authentic manner and thus I had become capable of eliciting a new perception of the world, which matched its new description” (xiii). Finally, and not least in importance, part of the implied non-fictional character of the texts resides in the identification of specific techniques for the alteration of awareness including psychedelic drugs, virtual dreaming, and careful attention to what people don’t usually attend to such as the space between objects. The fact that these techniques can be practiced, and some people did so, sustains the work’s reference to real world practices and the supposed reportage quality of the texts.

It should be clear that this non-fictional framework for the text is a complex one and not simply “objective anthropology.” Indeed, Castaneda to a certain extent highlights the genre difficulty of cultural anthropology where there is abiding question over whose reality the scientist should report. If the purpose is the reconstruction of a culture, does any anthropological description have to employ the terms of the culture studied? In Castaneda’s commentary on his work, he defines his methodology, credited to Harold Garfinkel, such that “any phenomenon being researched had to be examined in its own light and according to its own regulations and consistencies” (xii). This approach gives primacy to the studied culture’s “reality.” Not surprisingly, this would clearly have implications for the participant researcher, and Castaneda reports that, “At a given moment, unbeknownst to me, my task mysteriously shifted from the mere gathering of anthropological data to the internalization of the new cognitive processes of the shamans’ world” (xiii). In short, Castaneda, like an anthropologist caught up in the culture being studied, admits to going native as a necessary element of truly understanding a different approach to the world. In the end, he defines his work such that “Most of the processes which I have described in my published work had to do with the natural give and take of my persona as a socialized being under the impact of new rationales” (xiv). The problem may be then that in participatory anthropology the student of a culture may need to internalize the perceptions of that culture and then present what may be “fictions” such as witchcraft as the reality accepted by the culture. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this paper, Castaneda’s framing claims are clearly that his encounters really happened to him and that persons undergoing such training would experience such alternative worlds and find that don Juan’s account of the world needs to be taken as a real and credible ontology, that the universe is not at all like we think, and that we can encounter “real” alternate realities.

Castaneda’s texts do not collapse immediately under the reader’s skepticism into sham or fiction because he carefully maintains a complex equipoise. In The Teachings of Don Juan his fantastic experiences occur under a variety of hallucinogenic plants so that the experiences can always be credited to subjective psychedelic experience. This is most evident and cleverly handled in his first experience with peyote, personified as the benefactor Mescalito by don Juan. After chewing a number of peyote buttons, Castaneda has an extraordinary playful encounter with a “dog” that seems to radiate an intense light. According to don Juan, he was playing with Mescalito, which has marked him as the chosen who don Juan must teach. However, Castaneda goes back to the house of the people who gave him the peyote and they describe what seems a clearly objective world where Castaneda actually chased after and played with the family dog. The exchange between don Juan and Castaneda on this matter is telling.

Driving back to don Juan’s place I asked him: “Did all that really happen, don Juan?”

“Yes,” he said, “but they don’t know what you saw. They don’t realize you were playing with ‘him.’ That is why I did not disturb you.” “But is this business of the dog and me pissing on each other true?”

“It was not a dog! How many times do I have to tell you that? This is the only way to understand it. It’s the only way! It was ‘he’ who played with you.”

…..

“Did the dog really play with me as they say?”

“Goddammit! It was not a dog!” (Castaneda, The Teachings, 32)

Here several possible interpretations exist. Castaneda may have been playing with a regular dog and simply had a curious experience because of the Peyote, don Juan may simply be providing a model for interpreting a subjective experience that fits an interpretative frame, don Juan may believe that Castaneda was playing with some real force called Mescalito which really was not such a force but in fact was the family dog, or don Juan’s account is true and Castaneda really encountered Mescalito.

The force of Castaneda’s works is that the tension in the equipoise is steadily increased. After smoking a hallucinogenic mixture, Castaneda has under don Juan’s direction the experience of becoming a crow.

I had no difficulty whatsoever eliciting the corresponding sensation to each one of his commands. I had the perception of growing bird’s legs, which were weak and wobbly at first. I felt a tail coming out of the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones. The wings were folded deeply. I felt them coming out by degrees. The process was hard but not painful. Then I winked my head down to the size of a crow. But the most astonishing effect was accomplished with my eyes. My bird’s sight!” (Castaneda, The Teachings, 133).

Castaneda has the vague memory of being thrown up in the air and flying as a crow, and under don Juan’s promptings, has a series of memories of unique perceptions as a crow. Don Juan, however, complicates the matter when pressed about whether Castaneda really became a crow. “‘It takes a very long time to learn to be a proper crow,’ he said. ‘But you did not change, nor did you stop being a man. There is something else’” (Castaneda, The Teachings, 144). Are these simply hallucinations? Is don Juan a trickster promoting certain experiences? What is this something else that Juan hints at? This is what the later books unravel, gradually replacing the emphasis on psychedelic experiences that can easily be dismissed as merely subjective with more problematic encounters. Don Juan has warned Castaneda of entities he calls “allies” which are inexplicable forces, and that when grappled with by a warrior can also be givers of secrets. In the hills as part of his training he is confronted with what may seem allies. “Next there was a downpour of cracking explosions; branches were being snapped with great force all around me” (Castaneda, A Separate Reality, 240). At first, Castaneda suspects that he is simply being tricked by don Juan, an explanation which he abandons as the noises accelerate and included a slurping noise. “If don Juan was doing all that, he had to be running in circles at an incredible speed. The rapidity of the sounds made that alternative impossible” (241). In the end, Castaneda gives up his attempts to explain his experiences. This leaves the reader with several alternatives. Castaneda could indeed find himself being tricked, don Juan’s explanation could be correct, or this is simply a fiction which either of the two could be a plausible reading within the fictional discourse of the work. There is no ready resolution.

The texts increase the fantastic quality of the experiences and the emphasis on don Juan’s explanations. Without the influence of psychedelic substances, Castaneda is chased by a strange, dark square entity (Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, 175) which don Juan claims “are so real that ordinarily they kill people…” (177). He speaks with a coyote. Visiting a site where ancient sorcerers had buried themselves to resist death, Castaneda, with don Genaro and don Juan, is confronted by an onslaught of the old seers, grotesque men who squeaked like bats or rats as well as their allies.

When I reached the group I realized that don Juan was right; they were not really men. Only four of them had any resemblance to men, but they were not men either; they were strange creatures, with huge yellow eyes. The others were just shapes that were propelled by the four that resembled men.

I felt extraordinarily sad for those creatures with yellow eyes. I tried to touch them, but I could not find them. Some sort of wind scooped them away (Castaneda, The Fire from Within, 245).

Most strangely of all Castaneda reports leaping into a gorge with two other apprentices and surviving.

Pablito, Nestor, and I didn’t die at the bottom of that gorge — and neither did the other apprentices who had jumped at an earlier time — because we never reached it; all of us, under the impact of such a tremendous and incomprehensible act as jumping to our deaths, moved our assemblage points and assembled other worlds (The Fire from Within, 300).

What are we to make of such strange occurrences? The original equipoise has shifted and left us with more difficult readings. One reading would still hold the work as non-fictional, the fantastic experiences “real” and occult, “Because by focusing attention on phenomenon which break the normal frame of reality but still have to be accounted for within it, he is in fact not asserting a separate reality but a reality which impinges on this one and threatens it by phenomenal means” (Murray 181). Or we could reject these experiences and their explanations as possible, treat them as fictional, and so read them as Todorov’s marvelous. Or we could read them once again as somehow explainable, and that in fact they are (despite the claims of the narrator) really the result of the ways in which Castaneda has been co-opted into don Juan’s world view by a combination of hallucinogens, trickery, and persuasion which makes these fantastic events merely uncanny. Finally, one could accept Michael E. Gorman’s reading which rejects the “reality” claims entirely about whether Castaneda really became a crow or talked to a coyote or, I suppose, jumped into the gorge. Instead, he correctly suggests “Don Juan’s ultimate goal was to destroy his apprentice’s description of the world by opposing it to another equally valid but radically different view” (168). The result would be “stopping the world,” the cessation of our inner talk that categorizes the world so that Castaneda could see reality as it is, with the recognition that the world as we know it is merely a view (169). This stance, of course, partially accepts the non-fictional character of the narration and holds that both our ordinary interpretation of the events and the extraordinary encounters are “true” as views, a different form of equipoise. Gorman’s interpretation is not surprising given that so much of the later works provide don Juan’s detailed explanatory account of the world where we are assemblages of “light” emanations connected by numerous and specific nodal points to the universe. He uses his ontology to explain earlier events.

I again asked don Juan the question I had asked him dozens of times. I wanted to know whether I had physically turned into a crow or had merely thought and felt like one. He explained that a shift of the assemblage point to the area below always results in a total transformation. He added that if the assemblage point moves beyond a crucial threshold, the world vanishes; it ceases to be what it is to us at a man’s level (The Fire From Within, 136).

Don Juan admits that this ontology is only another way of explaining what men of knowledge “see,” and holds that we have different encounters or views of worlds based on the position of the assemblage points. Such a reading may be difficult for those who do not want to credit either the other realities postulated by don Juan or his ontological account of the world. As a result, the equipoise established in the early works based on the general discomfort of the reader with strange encounters slides away from the occult to either the uncanny or the marvelous.

As the readings of the individual fantastic encounters shift, so does the overall frame of the texts, though different readers clearly can have extremely divergent readings. In a discussion at a theory round table at a conference, John Clute indicated that all good texts should be seen as having their harmonic overtones. In the case of Castanenda, I find that there are the non-fictional and fictional notes that can both play at the same time with varying degrees of intensity depending on the reader and the moment in the transaction with the text. It would be fairly easy to take the The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge as a non-fictional work that reports Castaneda’s actual experience — reading the actual fantastic events as uncanny, occult, or both — while entertaining an alternative reading that sees the work as fiction and identifies the anthropological apparatus as merely a fictional frame. Other readers, based on some of the criticism of the work, including the supposed implausibility of the don Juan character, might view the work as fictional while entertaining the possibility that the work could really be an account of Castaneda’s experiences, as he claims. As the texts progress, and the reading of the fantastic as rationally explainable and so merely uncanny becomes more difficult, the works make ever greater demands on those who would wish to read the text as non-fictional. To do so would either require importing rational explanations for Castaneda’s experiences that he seems to undercut or increasingly accepting occult events that infringe on our common construction of reality as well as adopting don Juan’s radically alternative ontological description. The temptation then is to increasingly treat the texts as fiction with only a diminishing sense of some possibility that they report Castaneda’s experiences in the world. This is made possible because the texts also echo the narrative structures of fantasy novels, including the quest, the gradual acquisition of power, the helper figures, the experience of strange beings and worlds, the conflict with hostile forces and more. Because, then, of the multiple possible readings of the fantastic events internal to the text, as well as the shifting contexts for the books, there is a complex sliding over the text’s status which allows readers to hold differing degrees of emphasis on the text’s relative non-fictional or fictional status, or its role as an occult work presenting alternative realities that exist as life worlds that can be experienced or as fictional constructions where the fantastic is the marvelous of fantasy. While some may reject the works completely as merely a nasty trick or read them entirely as clever works of fantasy, I suspect at differing levels readers may be left wondering or at least being engaged by the possibility that somehow Castaneda’s accounts are true of our world.

I do not agree with David Murray that we can evade the debate about whether Castaneda was writing anthropology or fiction. He would like to see the fundamental question as being “which sort of fiction Castaneda is writing: occult (depending on realism as a framework which is temporarily ruptured) or modern nonrealist fiction which presents multiple realities and refuses primacy to any one level — Pynchon or Burroughs, for instance” (181). Murray concludes that, in fact, Castaneda was writing fictional occult. However, the structural implications of the works and the demands they make on the reading seem to me to be deeply routed in the equipoise of the works. Don Juan’s claims are made as if they apply to the actual conditions of the world, that his signs, in Derrida’s language, have some transcendental signifier, with a complex, integrated alternative ontological explanation of the fantastic.

‘The total world is made of the forty-eight bands,’ he said. ‘The world that our assemblage point assembles for our normal perception is made up of two bands; one is the organic band, the other is a band that has only structure, but no awareness. The other forty-six great bands are not part of the world we normally perceive.’ He paused again for pertinent questions. I had none. ‘There are other complete worlds that our assemblage points can assemble,’ he went on (The Fire From Within, 163).

In fiction the system of claims exists within the sign system of the works without any external reference, which fortunately makes fantasy possible, and so neither the events nor the alternative ontology need have any bearing on our given life world. The work builds its tension and appeal on the problematic question about whether such events could happen in our world and what we should make of don Juan’s alternative account of the world, a tension built around the equipoise of the fantastic elements in the works themselves.

This problematic has direct bearing on whether Castaneda’s works really serve as a post-modern vanguard that undercuts the nonfiction/fiction distinction, inscribes the limits of the totalizing force of rationality, and highlights the fact that we live in fictions, an explicit theme of the work. The post-modern position of the text depends on the relative position on the equipoise of the work. A literal reading of the works as non-fiction adopted by some followers of Castaneda undercuts a post-modern reading by embracing a new ontology. Under such a reading, while our experiences may be constructed, Castaneda’s works offer an actual route to power and an encounter with real, although extraordinary worlds; our more limited rationality is simply transplanted by the more encompassing truths of don Juan. The source of truth is “seeing,” a kind of fundamental encounter with the Real without our habitual language for describing the world. To read the works as completely fiction also undercuts the post-modern reading. The non-fictional frame is either a trick or a literary device that says little about the blurring of non-fiction and fiction, of the way, for example, anthropology may be unavoidably engaged in certain fictions. As fiction, the fantastic elements and the claims of don Juan become circumscribed in the marvelous charmed circle of the works and do not have any weight in either marking the limits of the rationality that defines our life worlds or somehow establishing how we should become sorcerers in charge of the fictions of our lives. The question, then, is to the extent that various equipoised readings of the works sustain such a reading. To the extent that we may be engaged actively in the problematic of the work, we could indeed be made self-conscious of the ways in which we take certain constructions of the world for granted, how we rationalize “fantastic” experiences, the ways we live out fictions. This, however, as I hope I have demonstrated, is a very unstable equipoise, tending to collapse, probably to the fictional pole for most readers. With the collapse, I suspect the possible post-modern thrust of the work also diminishes, depending on the relative strength of the remaining notes of the alternative readings.

Bibliography

Castaneda, Carlos. The Fire from Within. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

______________ Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. New York: Washington Square Press, 1972.

______________ A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with don Juan. New York: Washington Square Press, 1971.

_______________ The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

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Mendlesohn, Farah. “Toward A Taxonomy of Fantasy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13.2 (2002):169–183.

Murray, David. “Anthropology, Fiction and the Occult: The Case of Carlos Castaneda.” Literature of the Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Peter Messent. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981. 171–183.

Noel, Daniel C. “Tales of Fictive Power: Dreaming and Imagination in Ronald Sukenick’s Postmodern Fiction.” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture 5.1 (1976): 117–136.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Don Juan’s Last Laugh: A Novelist Looks at Carlos Castaneda’s Fourth and Final Don Juan Trip and Discovers a Fellow Artist at Work.” Psychology Today. (September 1974): 10–13.

Olson, Alan M. “From Shaman to Mystic: an Interpretation of the Castaneda Quartet.” Soundings: an Interdisciplinary Journal 16.1 (1978): 47–67.

Sukenick, Ronald. “Upward & Juanward: The Possible Dream.” The Village Voice 25 Jan. 1973: 30.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

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