Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the “Don Juan” Writings of Carlos Castaneda ed. by Daniel C. Noel (review)

Reviews 243 the shit kicked out of them by white cowboys, Mexicans, and even other Indian vets. This is what the world’s witchery wants. Such is the depressingly alienative scene Leslie Silko paints as the backdrop to her first novel, Ceremony. Its theme, like its distinguished predecessors, The Man Who Killed the Deer, House Made of Dawn, and Winter in the Blood, is restoration of the Indian psyche dislocated from native culture and land by the malignant despotism of Euro-American rationalism. The protagonist, a returned Laguna pueblo veteran, Tayo, suffers a profound guilt because he could not prevent the death of his cousin (and adoptive brother) Rocky. Nor could he keep himself from seeing the face of his beloved uncle Josiah in the visage of a captured Japanese soldier executed in My Lai fashion. White medicine is ineffectual in treating his war hysteria, for it does not recognize the witchery at the source of modern horrors. Only when Tayo sceptically submits to the ministrations of a largely discredited Navajo medicine man, Betonie, does he learn the true nature of the evil set abroad upon the world. Through a synthesis of Betonie’s innovative medicine and the ancient wisdom embodied in Laguna mythology, Tayo discovers a ceremony capable of transitioning him back to the sane, holistic world of native vision. Ceremony is exceptional in its interweaving of individual and cosmic fate, a drama framed by the polarities of traditional Laguna and con­ temporary Western metaphysics. The demonic darkness in American consciousness is counterbalanced by a native-born sense of affirmation. Leslie Silko has already demonstrated her marvelous poetic gifts in Laguna Woman and her magical facility with short fiction in “Yellow Woman” and other stories appearing in Kenneth Rosen’s The Man to Send Rain Clouds. This, her first novel, is brilliant by any standard, worthy to be savored along with recent masterpieces by such native craftsmen as N. Scott Momaday and James Welch. They too are poets who turned their hands to the novel with extraordinary results. And Ceremony likewise gives eloquent testimony to the redemptive power of our indigenous, and truly American, cultures. JACK L. DAVIS, University of Idaho Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the “Don Juan” Writings of Carlos Castaneda. Edited by Daniel C. Noel. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976. 250 pages, $7.95.) The “don Juan books” — The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power — must be considered among the significant works in western American literature. Quite beyond the question of don Juan’s identity or “reality” (a point which has bedeviled some critics) lies the import of the tetralogy in terms of idea and insight. 244 Western American Literature To put a complex issue in outline form, the philosophy of don Juan comes out of the “primitive,” out of the “folk,” out of the wilderness, and out of the mystic and nonrational, to confront us with one of the most bizarre and yet compelling “Others” in literary history. For the most part, Seeing Castaneda approaches the tetralogy on this serious, if not portentous level, and some of the essays are indeed heavyweight. After Daniel Noel’s introduction, entitled “Taking Castaneda Seri­ ously,” the book moves through the agitated first reactions of an offended anthropologist (Weston La Barre, given here perhaps as a sample of the establishment), through an interview with Castaneda, which though very careful on his part still has the freshness of primary material, through the tendentious gossip of Time magazine, and on into the real meat of the collection, four rather wide-ranging essays by Theodore Roszak, Carl Oglesby, Joseph C. Pearce, and James W. Boyd. These essays look at don Juan in (and against) the Newtonian world; as an exponent of a comprehensive philosophy and psychology which has “heart” and which may help save us from ourselves; as a co-revolutionary of the spirit with Jesus Christ; and as the bringer of a “remarkable parallel” to the ancient wisdom of Buddhism. Perhaps a quotation from Oglesby’s essay, “A Juanist Way of Knowl­ edge,” will illustrate the suggestiveness of Castaneda’s books: Juanist psychology rejects a scarcity-model of spirit and that...