Just a short comment on Carlos Castaneda. You will usually find his books in the fiction section. Fiction is different than ‘hoax’. Anyone obsessed enough to write two books which try to prove that Castaneda’s work was falsified, probably has too much time on his hands. Why not attack Marvel Comics? This may seem over simplified given the fact that so many took the on-going fantasy to be ‘truth’, but literature has always been a dangerous game.
Bill Gravengood
A hoax is when somebody deliberately creates an event that is intended to be taken for something other than what it is.
That’s what Castaneda did. He created events, and a phony culture, with the intention of fooling people. He claimed for years (I don’t know what happened later) that what he wrote about was the literal truth. I knew many people interested in religious experiences who discussed the books, and whether it was appropriate for them to go and take peyote (or whatever it was).
Actually, hoax is too kind a word. Makes it sound like a prank. The man was a liar.
Oh, and welcome to the board.
I will say in P.S. that your broader point has a lot of merit. When literature “imagines” things it can’t avoid, even though it’s “pretending,” making comments about reality. Science fiction is a great example. Jules Verne writes about going to the moon, and 50 years later young Werner Von Braun, reading this, decides to become a rocket engineer.
Welcome to the board bgravengood. It is customary to provide a link to the article you are referring to:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/020621.html
Maybe Richard de Mille was obsessed to bother debunking Carlos but if I had actually slaved over a real anthropology PhD thesis I might be a little pissed too.The word “fraud” seems appropriate to me.
Despite being interested in lucid dreaming I could never read one of Castenada’s books knowing that he actually expected me to take it as a real account.
They should be under fiction, but that has not been my experience. I am not aware of Castaneda ever admitting that Don Juan Matos was a fictional character.
The teachings of Don Juan is filed under History in the Library of Congress catalog, and under religion and mythology in the Dewey decimal system. Other books of his are filed under psychology and history, but none I could find are filed under literature or fiction.
Just a note. Although de Mille is mentioned above, nobody has given the names of his books. His Castaneda’s Journey was his first critique of Castaneda, but is pretty hard to come by. He later edited The Don Juan Papers, which included essays by himself and others. De Mille’s debunking (and those of the others is TDJP) is mixed with some witty writing and peppered with salt. One contributor to TDJP, criticizing the New Mexico desert Castaneda describes as unreal, calls his piece “THe Lion, the Witch, and the Horned Toad”. De Mille, commenting on Castaneda’s correspondence with mushroom expert Gordon Wasson, notes that “There are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your mycology.” One critic of deMille’s (in another book I have, with a title something like “Exploring Castaneda”) accuses de Mille of excessive levity, of “seeking the wise-crack between the worlds”. But I find de Mille’s writing exhilarating. And a real hoot.
In the library where I work, Carlos Castaneda’s book are classified in the History section. Under “Indians of North America – History.”
Castaneda’s books get checked out a lot and are almost never returned. He hasn’t been as popular in the last couple of years.
Hmm, well this is all kind of interesting. Probably I’m relying too much on my own personal experience with Castaneda, and not really taking the whole thing all that seriously. Like bibliophange admitted, I have never actually read any quotes by the author regarding the validity of his stories either, though maybe they really do exist. Anyway, whether or not Castaneda was a pathological liar doesn’t interest me as much as his work does. There are a lot of artists who have done worse than rip-off their readers to make a few extra bucks: Lewis Carroll may or may not have been a paedophile, D.H. Lawrence apparently had the nasty habit of beating the shit out of his wife, Rembrandt used to steal money from his own son’s inheritance to help pay for his exorbitant lifestyle, and on and on. While I certainly don’t mean to put Castaneda’s books on the same level as the above mentioned, I will say that, for whatever reason he wrote his series on Don Juan, he did a pretty good job of it. If the Library of Congress ended up filing them under “History”, which anyway seems a bit strange given the fact that he just died a few years ago, I only have to laugh – after all, that would be their mistake, not his. All the books that I’ve read by Castaneda I’ve found in the fiction section. I don’t say this because I’ve done research on the matter, I say this because I generally read only fiction and so that’s where I go when I’m looking for a book. When my friends and I used to read them, we never once believed what he said to be the ‘Truth’, we read them because they were entertaining and often strangely insightful.
bgravengood
Whether or not Castaneda is a pathological liar is different from Carroll’s possibly being a pedophile, since it directly affects the validity of his work. Id castaneda lies about his field work, how much can you trust it? There are those who claim that his metaphysics is still valid, but at best that still doesn’t make up for his anthopological inaccuracy and misleading. At worst, even his mysticism is under attack. (See de Mille’s TDJP, which includes an “ethnoglossary” that shows where Castaneda most likely “lifted” his metaphysical insights from.)
But filing Castaneda’s work under “History” is clearly misrepresentation. Even by his own admission, the stuff he describes isn’t Yaqui Indian lore. According to his critics, it’s cobbled-together New Age stuff, not authentic religion/philosiophy/mysticism. In TDJP there’s a whole section on how Castaneda’s stuff is classified in the libraries.
Ok, I’ll just say one more thing about this and then I’ll shut up. I’m sure that will make the world a better place. Yes, I can see that, from your point of view, Castaneda’s maybe being a pathological liar is different from the possible defects of another writer ( I refuse to drag poor Lewis Carroll through the mud a third time in one day) because, as you say, it would directly effect the validity of his work. That is of course if you think he sat down at his typewriter everyday and cranked out stories only because he wanted to confound the world with his real life anthropological studies of the Yaqui Indians. Yes, I know, that’s what he said he was doing, and I’m sure that that was a lie. Nevertheless, Castaneda was a good writer - he wasn’t a great writer, but he had his moments. He had an imaginative and believable (maybe too believable) style that involved the reader and created an original, literary world. You can agree or disagree with this statement, but the fact that he sold over eight million copies of his books would tend to make one think that there was something more than fake anthropology going into them. I have an old copy of “Tales of Power” in front of me. Here is a quote by The New York Times book reviewer Elsa First: “A splendid book. Tales of Power starts out only a few months after Journey to Ixtlan left off, but the pace is accelerated and the scale is grander. The figures of Carlos and don Juan loom as do the great characters of fiction, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.”
I was glad to see that my friends and I weren’t the only ones that saw his writing for what it was: fiction. The guy was certainly no saint, and whether or not he even did ‘field studies’ doesn’t really matter much to me or to several million other readers.
Ha- I’ve enjoyed the Castenada books, and am re-reading them now. What I get out of Carlos’ ‘hack’ of UCLA is that just because something was awarded a PhD it ain’t necessarily so! (Particularly THEM, a very appropriate locale for revenge on bluring the distinction between fantasy and fact). Whether his trick had any socially redeeming value of not, people have used hoax’s before to make a point, to wit:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/robbins_tikkun.html
But I might be totally wrong.
This is my first visit, and of course I’ve been following along - and finally would like to comment. 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…
buffs99-“Could this column not perfectly describe arguments about the Bible?”
It could indeed and has been. The bible is a collection of books of varying historical authenticity. The significant difference is that the bible springs from generations of tradition, moral and philosophical codes that were lived by(thus tested) over the course of many years. I’m sure that you can see that philosophical lessons given in the bible have a much better foundation than those cobbled together by a heavily drugged college student. The fact that he was basically lying so that he could get his PhD makes it even shakier.
Still some people have success using his methods for “dreamwork” so I guess the end product isn’t useless. It could be worse, he could have written “Dianetics”.(I wonder if that one word will be enough to attract a few Scien*ology trolls )
Not to be rude but: “There is such a thing as collective unconscious.” – umm could I get a definition and cite?
Hey, jeepers! No one has commented on how entertaining Carlos Casteneda’s work was. My own favorite was A Separate Reality, which made a spiritual impression on me as a yout’. Was any of it true? Who cares? The rest of his stuff was all downhill from that point, and any moron could tell.
I’m feel confident (from my limited experience) that no one suffered any lasting ill effects from reading the stuff, as compared to, for example, reading or following any of the so-called teachings of Timothy Leary, a true con man.
I would question how historically authentic some collections have been interpreted. It’s more than coincidence that religions all over the world have similar universal motifs. For example, the virgin birth, the flood, the death, then new life. Strangely these are all strikingly similar, however each religion claiming to have the correct version.
This is collective unconscious… drawing from the relationship of your own deepest self. A connection that ultimately is a bond between every person. Castaneda’s sudden insights should not be debated as to fact or fiction. Who are we to say that someone’s own psyche is false? A real clue as to the disconnect that has wedged between the mythological and institutional realm.
Castenda’s books enabled us to step into another realm–maybe the realm of collective consciousness, or maybe just the realm of like-minded people who liked to alter their consciousness and step into a magical world. The Don Juan books were merely another artifact of the sixties and early seventies mindset and were expressive of that mindset. At its best, it lent an air of mysticism to everyday encounters, and at its worst it did nothing, like when you you throw the I Ching over and over hoping to get a good reading and always comes up with “Work on What Has Been Spoiled.”
I agree with buffs99 that Carlos’s stuff should not be debated as to its facuality. Rather focus on how it made readers think and feel about themselves and the world they inhabited. For comparison, see Ken Carey’s Return of the Bird Tribes or any number of New Age stories that some folks feel to be true. These are true to the extent that they tune readers in to a meaningful way of perceiving the usual mundane world as something worth one’s interest.
Personally I think of the “collective conciousness” as the sum of tradition and history we maintain. Deliberate falsehoods diminish us all.
What I get from looking deep inside is that we are all lone islands of conciousness trying to communicate through the smoke signals of language and action. If you have some proof that we are all actually “bonded” I’d love to see the cite. You are entitled to your own beliefs, just don’t say “there is a collective unconcious” unless you can provide evidence.
See anything by Carl Jung. E.g., http://www.cgjungpage.org/jplexicona2h.html
defines Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.
buffs99, apparently through a technical glitch, started a double-thread on the subject here. In that double I wrote, largely, the following:
And to come back to this one, coolestwhiteboy and CarnalK accurately point out that out of the whole “consciousness expansion” movement indeed came writings such as Leary’s and Hubbard’s that have resulted in much actual detriment to impressionable people’s psyches, bank accounts, and life and limb.
The biggest objection to Castaneda for many of us is his pretense that he was involved in an actual scholarly work; though I suppose the UCLA Grad School shared a lot of the blame (And I suspect it’s a case where the Department knew what good P-R it would be to have a bestselling author on “higher consciousness” in the degree list) he surely milked it for all it was worth and AFAIK didn’t unequivocally say to his critics, “Hey, guys, you are getting ‘whooshed’.”
jrd
I know of Jung’s theories but that is merely an example of another person who believes in a collective unconciousness. It should be noted most of Jung’s theories were formulated without even the limited knowledge we have today about how the brain physically works.
But before this turns into a Great Debate let me just say that in my opinion Castenada was something of a liar. If people can gain benefit from his lies then good for them, not him. (everyone read “Cat’s Cradle”)