Diction
Comic strip
Peter Ackroyd
Tales of Power, Carlos Castaneda (Hodder and Stoughton £3.50) "Do you know that one moment can be eternity?" says don Juan to Carlos Castaneda, with the same breathless originality you would expect from Julie Andrews singing of similar things in The Sound of Music. Yes, I have heard such things about "eternity" before, but it comes as a counter-cultural shock to see them repeated in a book which is supposed to be expanding the mind rather than filling it with ancient cliches: "Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness." This is an important point, of course, and it will no doubt be met by a reverent silence among the student population of America and their professors of sociology, anthropology and contemporology. But for the rest of us, average and unenlightened as we are, what is trite remains trite even when it is announced in solemn and pietistic terms.
For those of you who have not been following the series, Carlos Castaneda is on a magical mystery tour in search of that perennial illusion which always appeals to faddists, "the totality of oneself"; his guide and perfect master is don Juan. who says a great many perfect things about the "ultimate nature" of reality. Castaneda is continually being surprised, agitated and amazed and, I would have thought, is an easy lay for any sorcerer with his eye on the main chance. Their relationship is much like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except it is Panza who insists on tilting at windmills. After a great many feats of prestidigitation and levitation, Castaneda is carried over the threshold of his perception and is left to jump, literally, into the dark.
There has been some minor controversy over the authenticity of Castaneda's works: are they factual or fictional, and is Castaneda now a perfect "warrior" or is he what he may always have been : a businessman? These are not interesting questions. The books themselves have to be central, so are they worth reading?Tales of Power, despite the astonished and revelatory terms in which it is couched, simply repeats most of the truisms of conventional religious literature. Although Castaneda's mysticism is neatly packaged, and tricked out with some charming Mexican expressions, the experience itself and the account of that experience stay very close to the stereotypes: "We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our life-time." The fact that Castaneda is always dragging in this hoary seventeenth century concept of "reason", and that he even manages to include something known as the "will" as well, suggests that initiation is not what it used to be. Castaneda merely regurgitates the conventional mystical attitudes, but at this late date they are simplistic and confused.
But the perfect warrior is no slouch, and he has used all the paraphernalia of a false culture to prop up his archaic points. Castaneda caught the counter-culture just at its tumescence and he purveys his mysticism in a fashionably Amero-Indian setting and with a liberal sprinkling of hallucogenic drugs. Fashion, it seems, can make masters of us all and that image of the warrior — determined, self-sufficient and full of power — is one that will appeal to middle-class youth and to their academic fellow-travellers. The secret of popular success is to say conventional things so baldly and so often that the ignorant and the innocent will assume them to be original. I would rather read Thomas Traherne than Carlos Castaneda, but then tradition is an acquired taste, and you cannot expect readers or pub3ishers to look beyond a fast buck and a fast success.
The narrative itself is winsome to a degree. The improbabilities and the coincidences are so brazen that I can only assume the book is factual, but Castaneda and his perfect master are so fatuous that they resist any attempt to look at them sympathetically as recognisable human beings. Mysterious looks are always being given and cryptic things are often being said — "Somehow you would have found me," says don Juan as he magically turns himself into Greta Garbo.
So the prose of Castaneda's revelations is turgid and inept, and his characters are sheer cardboard; but it must also be said that he is a dab hand with the sublime and the beautiful, and I suspect that his books sell to that vast bulk of the reading public who prefer shivers down their spines to anything more substantial. If he had not made his pile out of pop religion, he would have been a very good writer of ghost stories or the more gory kinds of comic strip. When he gets down to the direct transcription of places and situations, his prose comes alive and takes on a very subtle and artificial directness — and it is only when he goes on about enlightenment that the prose becomes the flaccid bearer of cliche. But I suppose the critics will still praise him for his inane ramblings about essence and one-ness, and that illusion which all good fiction should destroy — the illusion that the world has a perceptible form, a glowing essence to which poor humankind can connect — will be perpetuated and will remain a source of grief and embarrassment to those who are silly enough to fall for it.
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