Letters to the Editor
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No shame in being more sham than shaman
Carlos Casteneda deserves credit for being a superb storyteller. And one can't blame him for exploiting this gift in the environment in which his books took root.
I first got to know his books when I was in college, in the early 1970's. My then-husband, a modern Walter Mitty who was one of those people who was strongly suggestible and prefered fiction to reality, introduced me. That's one indicator of Castaneda's appeal.
Another is the time and its inhabitants. Publishers looking for a score. College professors preaching to the turned-on generation. My first experience with pot had been a gift of my history professor, who was fond of getting high with the most pretentiously intellectual of his students. I wasn't "pretentiously" intellectual. But, as he pointed out, I was certainly smart....and I had great legs.
In those days, the intellectual "establishment" was looking for ways to be "with it" in an exclusive way that set them apart from, and above the merely cognisant. Castaneda fit the bill. He could be popularized, and still be intellectualized.
By way of further exposition...it was the same group that pronounced Jerzy Kosinski's work "literature".
In other words, it's great because we say so...and you just don't "get it."
As much as I believe (and to my credit, believed at the time) that Carlos Castaneda was most definitely fiction, I nontheless enjoyed his imaginative explorations, his suggestions of inner reality, and his writing.
The fact that people were debating then, and are still investigating acceptance of his books as nonfiction is just absurd. It's a good read, and a thoughtful journey to be taken with a glass of wine and wandering mind. Then again, when I cleaned my library out and decided what books were worth keeping, his went to the local library sale, their relevance expired, and their places taken by works exposing the run-up to Iraq...again...fiction advertised as reality.