Letters to the Editor
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Castaneda did not deny the fictional character of don Juan
In the article you state that, "Skepticism increased in 1972 after Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda's books as nonfiction."
I would suggest that Castaneda did not deny that he had created don Juan as a literary fiction. In a recent entry on the blog "You Bet Your Life", Harvey Bialy references a Letter to the Editor that he wrote to the Boston Phoenix in which he asks Mr. Castaneda, "Who Are You?"
"Mr. Castaneda's circumspect non-denial (Phoenix, April 19) of his correspondence with Mr. Bialy (Phoenix, April 12), brings to mind the funnel vision of poetic fiction, the prisms of fiction stretched outward to accommodate an expanding field of truths."
http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2007/04/harvey_bialy_th.html