published in June/July ‘04 American Book Review
Carlos Castaneda and the Border Between Literature and Life
Review of Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life With Carlos Castaneda. Amy Wallace.
Berkeley: Frog, Ltd. 2003
Whether you believe the twelve books Carlos Castaneda wrote are authentic, if unorthodox, anthropology, or that they are out-and-out academic frauds, they remain distinct works of literature, populated by memorable characters and high adventure. During the 1970’s, when the validity of Castaneda’s writing was actively debated, Joyce Carol Oates suggested that, reading his books as literature, it really didn’t matter whether the things Castaneda described had happened or not. “One cannot exaggerate the significance of what Carlos Castaneda has done,” she wrote.
After all, Castaneda had, consciously or not, conjured his characters from the archetypes of fiction. Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer might be the visionary/hallucinatory don Quixote, and Castaneda’s portrayal of himself in the books, the hapless Sancho Panza. Or, moving forward in time, don Juan could be the omniscient Sherlock Holmes and Carlos, Dr. Watson, the sidekick who is only slightly dumber than the reader. “Perhaps his greatest charm as a writer,” Amy Wallace suggests, “was to make his readers feel that they would have made superior sorcerer’s apprentices.” She quotes William S. Burroughs lamenting: “Why didn’t don Juan pick me, instead of that idiot Carlos?”
To compare Sherlock Holmes’ creator with don Juan’s is apt.
At the height of the fictional detective’s popularity, fans, convinced that Holmes and Watson were real people, badgered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They came to him seeking answers to personal problems. He tried to help, even getting involved in two murder cases, but continued to deny Holmes’ reality.
Likewise, readers wanting to meet don Juan and join his group of sorcery apprentices pursued Castaneda. Unlike Doyle, Castaneda couldn’t very well insist that the people he wrote about were fictive (and he continued to assert the authenticity of his stories to the end of his life). However, he devised clever ways to elude his fans, newspaper reporters and others—which only made him the more mysterious and irresistible, and kept the popularity of his books alive.
But unlike Doyle, who insisted that the Holmes stories properly belonged to “the fairy kingdom of romance,” and left it at that, Castaneda, in the early 1990’s, crossed the border separating authorial reality from the everyday kind by offering public lectures and workshops. He proposed to teach don Juan’s magic to whomever would pay his steep fees. In this way, Castaneda became a guru, and it was at this time that his life and Amy Wallace’s intersected.
Anyone with the genius and complexity of Castaneda probably needs several biographical volumes to tell the story satisfactorily. The first volume might deal with Castaneda the poor immigrant from Latin America who, as a UCLA student, gained the reputation of a sociable, charismatic and world-class liar, someone who could spin a fantastic yet believable yarn at the drop of a hat.
A second volume might tell the story of Castaneda as he told it in his books: of a shy, straight-laced and unimaginative academic who meets don Juan, a shaman, a “Neolithic sage” in the Sonora desert and is taken into an apprenticeship that has him changing into a crow, flying, and leaping into an abyss, only to awaken inexplicably in his Westwood apartment. Don Juan’s teachings include the arts of dreaming and stalking, practicing celibacy and impeccability—the highest standards of behavior toward all living things, including the earth itself.
The third volume might reveal the anthropologist-author as he was in the 1990’s: a womanizing, abusive cult leader, neither celibate nor impeccable; a consummate manipulator.
Practical publishing considerations as well as readers’ attention spans being what they are, Amy Wallace has done her best to tell all three stories in about 400 pages. She also includes an appendix of the major characters (who they said they were; who they really were), as well as public documents, such as Castaneda’s will and Death Certificate (inserted to counter the obfuscations of his disciples following his death). In Sorcerer’s Apprentice Wallace has written the third volume of the trilogy: the story of her romance with don Juan’s sorcery and Castaneda’s treachery.
Wallace is the daughter of the late novelist Irving Wallace. When as a younger writer Castaneda appeared at a party that her father was attending, the two men formed a deep, instinctual friendship. Their mutual attraction is easy to understand if one considers the quote from her father’s novel, The Prize, that Wallace uses as an epigraph for her own book: “All man’s honors to man are small beside the greatest prize… the final realization that life is not a daily dying… but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity.” Readers familiar with don Juan will recognize similar sentiments coming from him.
In the early 1990’s, at the time Castaneda began to court Amy, he had already surrounded himself with disciples, lovers and wives. Two of these, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner, published books detailing their supposed apprenticeships with don Juan. These publications in turn added to the validity of Castaneda’s own story.
Castaneda gently courted Amy (atypical conduct of a man who grabbed, even raped, whomever he wished), and was capable of working the deeply sentimental magic on her that he’d made don Juan famous for. “As enchanting as Carlos’ storytelling was his ability to listen,” Wallace writes. “His attention was total, his curiosity immense. He offered a striking contrast to the weak half-attention most of us give and receive in conversation…. In a way he reminded me of my father.” Once, on a visit to Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Castaneda pointed out various artifacts that he said resembled members of his group, the women he referred to as the “witches.” Finally, he brought Amy into a small room, waved his hand at a wall, and said, “There! Can you see it? Do you understand?” “On the wall,” writes Amy, “was an ancient death mask. It so resembled Irving that I let out a cry when I saw it and buried my face in my hands to hide my tears.”
Throughout her telling of the wonders and horrors of life with Castaneda, Wallace returns often to the central question of her narrative: “Over and over people asked me why I stayed, why I eventually pimped and lied and lived in fear and misery. I was stuck in the quicksand of hope and despair, and I could not leave.” When, later in her story, someone asks the same question, she answers “I didn’t feel I had any place else to go.” However, when she at last devotes herself to answering the question in depth, she reads the literature on gurus and cults, such as the work of Kramer and Alstad, who analyzed behavior patterns in the lives of charismatic-narcissistic gurus, and Eric Hoffer, who looked at the commonality of behavior of cults and mass movements, including Christianity and Nazism, to consider her predicament.
The attractions of authoritarianism, of the possibility that some one person knows the answers to life’s great questions and will share this knowledge with those willing to suspend their disbeliefs and surrender their selfhoods abound. That we don’t understand more about the mechanisms of this phenomenon is sad, though understandable. Few of us, for instance, have the guts to follow Eric Hoffer into an exacting point-by-point comparison of Jesus’ history and Adolf Hitler’s.
The appeal of literary figures such as don Juan and Sherlock Holmes, and of real people, such as Carlos Castaneda, is that they set themselves up as the ultimate authorities. They have all the answers, though they do or do not reveal them in their own good time. Among the many readers of Conan Doyle and Castaneda are some who have found the border between literature and life an irresistible crossing point. Drawn by personal need to the all-knowing authority figure, they gladly offer up their free will for a chance to receive the mysterious knowledge that the authority is thought to possess.
In the end, though, literary figures remain on the page where we can read about them whenever we wish. Real-life gurus, however, suffer the consequences of their humanity, even if they have prophesized a happier ending for their followers and themselves. Castaneda died an agonizing death from diabetes and liver cancer. He did not, as he had promised, “burn with the fire from within.” His disciples are currently suffering the failure of their master.
Amy Wallace, author or co-author of thirteen books, is a capable writer who has used her work on this book as one means of pulling herself from the wreckage of a life lived with a brilliant but thoroughly self-centered and abusive lover. And Wallace has succeeded in saving herself, though others of Castaneda’s disciples have not been so lucky. (It is virtually certain that the principal players committed suicide.)
But the guru’s charm is difficult to resist. Wallace quotes Castaneda’s invariable farewell words to his disciples in happier times: “Have a splendid day! Be a raccoon, devour every last moment of life, so delicious, so precious!”
©️ 2004 by Sandy McIntosh, all rights reserved
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