Don Juan as Supreme Fiction
Review of The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui way of knowledge,
by Carlos Castaneda, read by Peter Coyote, $15.95, 2 cassettes, 3 hours of listening, produced by Audio Literature, 325 Corey Way, Suite 112, South San Francisco, CA 94080‑6706
Don Juan, a Yaqui way of knowledge was a publishing event of the Sixties, giving academic legitimacy to the drug culture while at the same time initiating millions of youth alienated by their book culture into the oral world of exotic primitivism. For the decade following, Castenada became the focus of academics who debated the authenticity of his writings. What the intellectuals seemed not to have realized is that the standards they were using had long been obsolete. Television had already destroyed the distinctions between fact and fiction for the audience devouring Castaneda's writings.
What we can see now is that Don Juan's children are not the naive neo‑primitives in their 4x4's cruising the southwest for peyote, instead we witnessed the birth and proliferation of factual fictions, docu‑dramas, and "real" simulations of the daily news. Though Castenada was not the first to write fiction disguised as factual research, the history of anthropological writing is one monumental fiction, he was the first to provoke widespread soul‑full self examination within the academic community about how to classify such writing. Beyond these seemingly arcane disputes about what is factual about fiction and how fictional is fact, we can see that Castaneda prepared the public for the quest novels of Tolkein and the white shaman eclectic grab‑bag appropriation of native materials by Lynn Andrews; those young readers of the sixties are now in the English departments where fiction and fact are all reduced to texts, and the question of the author has faded into the background as impenetrable as the Sonora desert to the urban shamans. What we can see now, with the taped version read by Peter Coyote, is that the story of Don Juan was an oral story that "reads" best when heard, when the fictional teller, the I of the story, a young graduate student in anthropology, encounters the shaman, Don Juan, and apprentices himself to him by listening to his story.
What we can now recognize through hearing the story is that Castaneda has created a supreme fiction, one that involves the reader in a quest for identity mirroring the quest of the protagonist. When the student asks for objective proof, "But did I really fly, Don Juan?" his plea is a mockery of our questioning, "Is this really a true story? Is Castaneda really a graduate student? Is Don Juan really, I mean, really real?"
Don Juan is anthro‑fiction that allows us to see anthropology as fiction. But when we hear the story of Don Juan, we are better able to understand the attraction of the shaman's world for the graduate student tired of the bookish world of alienated, objective, individuality. It is not possible that this tape of Don Juan will have the impact on the times as did the book. But it is possible that it will become a classic of the genre for a new generation less likely to turn to psychedelic drugs to escape from the alienation of writing, more likely to seek and find some comfort in the middle ground, literature on tape, between the shaman's oral world and the academic's literate one.
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