Much of Western literature is deeply rooted in mythology, and beyond just literature. Many purport that the statements within a piece of work are false. Could this column not perfectly describe arguments about the Bible? We live in a society that constantly attempts to analyze and break down everything, categorize it into real and unreal. If I can’t touch it, or prove it - it’s false. There is such a thing as collective unconscious. Shall we break down Roan Stallion by Robinson Jeffers, rank it as fact or fiction? Or Don Quixote? Perhaps there are elementary ideas that are the root of the reading. Something more to be understood than just elements of what we think is reality…
Obviously another response to the Carlos Castaneda column. (*welcome, buffs99: the Moderator will be along shortly to remind you that “comments on columns” should include a link to the column being commented upon)
This column could, indeed, describe arguments that ARE made about the Bible, or the Book of Mormon, or the Qur’an – that they are fictional stories given their importance by their later historical impact.
However, part of the issue with Castaneda is that now, a whole generation later, there are those who are backpedaling and saying, “Oh, yeah, it was fiction all along… yeah, we knew that! You’re all just a buinch of linear conventional thinkers…” Well, a lot of them didn’t act like they did “get” it, back c. 1970…
You do not need to “break down” Don Quixote as to whether it’s fact or fiction: it’s fiction. But ** fiction with an important message that has joined the collective mind – and is in no way diminished by being,overtly and honestly, fiction. ** Miguel de Cervantes (or Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, or Mellville) did not have to pretend to being an accurate reporter of facts, endowed with a special enlightenment, and supported by a University’s graduate program, to make his point about the human condition. He just wrote a novel and called it that. His readers got the message and realized Miguel had a valid, world-scale insight, even though they knew it was just a novel.
OTOH, Castaneda either actively or passively encouraged for years the impression that he was arguing that what he was saying came out of a special, privileged viewpoint into actual Yaqui mystical teachings – or at least a special, privileged viewpoint into the meaning of some really wild peyote trips. And he even got a Ph.D., suppossedly the hallmark of rigurous original research, out of those writings. Whatever his deeper message may have been, he could just as well have made it by publishing overtly as fiction; or as straight essays on the psychedelic experience w/o manufacturing some sort of far-out scenario. Would have probably had as many followers either way, but may have missed out on the Ph.D., who knows.
We’ve no problem with delving into the spiritual and the cosmic, be it in fiction or essay. But the pretense that Castaneda’s was a scholarly work, and it turning out to be largely made up, does rile some of us.
A lot of the trouble comes out of how in 1968, something being published under a pretense of scholarship and sold as nominal “nonfiction” garnered a lot more credibility just because of that, than it would today. Had he come out in the 1990’s, we would not have had this debate A post-1980s Castaneda, even if classed as nonfiction, would have been headed immediately, “do not pass GO”, to the New Age section of the bookstore to hang out with The Celestine Prophecy (another piece of didactic/inspirational fiction whose authors annoyingly insisted in keeping up the pretense of being factually “real” for far too long).
jrd
( Aside: Closer to us in time, the makers of The Blair Witch Project, once the hype was well under way to making it a sure hit, were quite clear in that hey, it’s only a movie, there weren’t any missing film students in a Maryland forest. They didn’t keep it up and insist.)
JR- I think buffs99 made an accidental double post(made this new thread when trying top reply to the other). Maybe you should repost your excellent response in the other thread and let this double die a quick death. 