The Fire from Within by Carlos Castaneda (review)

Reviews 169 this year’s first place winner in William Abraham’s distinguished annual “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.” There is no melodrama in Carver’s spare, laconic, but brilliantly evoca­ tive fiction. “Vitamins,” for instance, begins: “I had a job and Patti didn’t. I worked a few hours a night for the hospital.” Patti does get herself a job, however, “for her self-respect.” She sells vitamins door to door. Eventually the narrator attempts to have an affair with one of his wife’s co-workers, but it is aborted by the advances of a black man at a “spade club” the couple goes to. The frustrated narrator returns home. His wife hears him and, think­ ing she has over-slept, gets up and dresses. The story concludes: I couldn’t take any more tonight. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m looking for something,” I said. I knocked some stuff out ofthe medi­ cine chest. Things rolled into the sink. “Where’s the aspirin?” I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn’t care. Things kept falling. Things do keep falling in Carver’sfictional world. With just a few excep­ tions, he suggests throughout his stories that we are victims of the continuous collapse of our hopes. In “The Bridle,” one of the characters sayssignificantly, “Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.” At times in his fiction adultery or alcoholism or estrangement afflicts a marital relationship, but always there is the problem of communication, for Carver’scharacters are essentially inarticulate. But it isprecisely their inartic­ ulateness that haunts us. It is what they do not say, what the author refuses to divulge, that is nuanced with menace, tinged with sinister suggestion. Under the quiet surfaces of his stories throb foreboding hints of disintegration and disaster. Carver’s characters, of course, reflect our own inarticulateness, our inability to tell others of our anxieties and expectations, of the random and confused impulses which determine our behavior. He writes of our silences. But these silences in Carver are like the ominous silence before a storm. They portend danger. And we read his stories with increasing alertness and mounting apprehension, waiting for and expecting the worst. Only rarely, as in the title story, do we see, and through a most unlikely agent—in this case, a blind man—the towering cathedral of our possibilities. PATRICIA SCHNAPP Bowling Green State University The Fire from Within. By Carlos Castaneda. (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1984. 296 pages, $16.95.) When Castaneda first published reports of his apprenticeship with a mesoamerican sorceror in 1968, he was hailed as a pioneer in anthropological reporting. Since that time, this elusive author has been unable to account for major inconsistencies and contradictions in his books, and refuses to furnish 170 Western American Literature any proof whatsoever that the extraordinary events he wrote about actually took place. Because of those facts Castaneda’scredibility as a nonfiction writer has all but disappeared. There is little doubt that, contrary to booksellers’ labels, Castaneda’s works do not represent the esoteric teachings of some lost subculture, but are rather creations that belong in the realm of fiction. The strong points of Castaneda’s early volumes (books one to three) were novelty, a sense of mystery, and richness of storytelling. In this seventh book, the novelty has long since worn off, the sense of mystery seems artificial, and the rich storytelling is scarce and not so rich. Never one for detailing settings, in Fire Castaneda ignores them completely. The book consists of flashbacks of an intellectual dialogue, often imageless, where the pupil (Carlos) asks a series of leading questions, and his teachers (don Juan and don Genaro) enlighten him as to the secret workings of the universe. Casta­ neda apologizes for this absence of setting in the book’s foreword, but then, amazingly, offers an explanation that, to borrow one of the author’s favorite phrases, nearly had me “choking with laughter.” You see, Castaneda is partially “amnesic” about many of the experiences he reports in Fire, because at those times he was in a state of “heightened awareness.” That state, which isinduced by a whack from don...