Books--Fiction

The Teachings of Don Juan:  A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is a surprising artifact of 1968.

Surprising, since the extraordinary impact of this book really doesn’t come until its paperback version published (and reprinted endlessly) in the 1970s.  But here it is, in an extremely rare first edition, issued by the University of California Press in probably fewer than 1250 copies.  The original price was $5.95.  This particular example was recently offered by an Internet seller for nearly $3000.

Once upon a time– say, about 1971-72–”everybody” was reading Castaneda.  The Teachings of Don Juan, by then in a paperback edition with a semi-psychedelic cover, was on hundreds of thousands of college-room bookshelves.  (Full disclosure: I was not one of the “everybody.”  I’ve just read this seminal 1960s book for the first time.)  There were several sequels in the early 1970s, including  A Separate Reality (1971) and A Journey to Ixtlan (1972), and even an appearance by Castaneda on the cover of TIME in March 1973.  But the original book’s notoriety is all the more surprising since it began as a work of (allegedly) serious, unassailable–if hardly conventional– anthropological scholarship, presented here in a plain, decidedly un-groovy university press edition.

Peruvian-born Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, and Don Juan was based on his dissertation research from the early 1960s on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest United States and northern Mexico.  It is emphatically not dissertation-like in style or substance.  Within its first few lines, Castaneda is introduced to a Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, who is alleged to be a powerful brujo, or shaman. Castaneda becomes apprenticed to him (not an easy passage) and is introduced to mind-altering organic hallucinogens such as peyote, jimson weed, and psilocybin mushrooms.  When Castaneda died in Los Angeles in 1998 (a death clouded in mystery and suspicion), the L.A. Times obituary writer called the book a “strange alchemy of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps great fiction,” a book that “made Don Juan a household name and Castaneda a cultural icon.”

One of the extraordindary things about this book was its instant and widespread critical reception.  How did a re-write of a Ph.D. dissertation (or maybe a master’s thesis; sources differ), published by a university press in a tiny edition, attract immediate, glowing reviews in the New York Times?  ”An extraordinary spiritual and psychological document,” wrote Charles Simmons in the Times on August 14, 1968:  ”Its style is so severe and yet easy, its narrative effects so expert, that if it had been published as a novel it would be, I think, destined for fame.”

The Teachings of Don Juan landed on fertile cultural territory in 1968, bringing together so many elements that now so clearly define the time:  a seeking for alternate pathways to spirituality; an openness to the teachings of “primitive” non-Western teachers or “gurus” (Don Juan is called a guru by more than one commentator); an eager, even grasping experimentation with mind-altering drugs; and a reverence for indigenous cultures, especially American Indians (and especially those of the Southwest).

Anthropology?  Fiction?  It  hardly seems to matter anymore, as it continues to maintain a firm grasp on its status as cultural icon.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

One of the most admired science-fiction movies of the last 50 years was Ridley Scott’s much-tinkered-with Blade Runner, released in 1982, and starring Harrison Ford as alien bounty hunter Rick Decker.  In its several versions, Blade Runner has been seen by hundreds of millions of people–far more, no doubt, than the numbers who have read the movie’s source material:  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a 1968 novel by one of science-fiction’s most revered masters.  Philip K. Dick is the only author primarily known for science fiction to be published by the prestigious reprint series, The Library of America.  In fact, the Library’s three volumes of collected novels by Dick exceeds the number it has so far devoted to the works of Theodore Dreiser, William James, or Sinclair Lewis, to name a few of the more distinguished literary lights on its list.

Reprints are just about the only versions of Dick’s books that are going to fall into your hands these days.  A first edition of Androids (depicted here) in hardback and with an intact dustcover is exceedingly rare: a copy was recently sold by Bauman Rare Books for more than $9,000.

The future — seen from 1968

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and you have to admit that the movie-makers were wise to change the name of this property) is considered one of Dick’s great “middle-period” novels, along with his famous counterfactual post-World War II novel, The Man in the High Castle from 1966. Coming to it decades, literally, after seeing Blade Runner–a dazzling vision of a future dystopia–it seems surprising to me that anyone ever saw the potential for a cultural landmark movie in it.   The novel’s 1992 setting (the date used in its earliest editions) is updated in the movie to 2019 A.D.–a now-looming date that seemed impossibly distant to me even in 1982 when I saw the movie.  Earth has been in large part devastated by nuclear weapons and fallout, but by then had also developed (and retained) very advanced city technologies and infrastructures and fabulous hovercraft personal vehicles–but still, oddly, had phone booths with dial telephones.  (Videophones, but still.)  The basic plot is retained:  a police department bounty hunter is assigned to eliminate (”retire”) a number of near-perfect humanoid androids (nicknamed “andies” in the book; called “replicants” in the movie), one of whom he falls in love with, sort of.  Dark complications and violence ensue.  The bounty hunter has to confront the meaning of life.  The movie and the book end ambiguously.

Electric and non-electric sheep

Truth be told, the movie makers (and it’s an incredibly long and involved getting-the-book-to-the-screen saga) left most of the novel behind.  This includes the plotline that gives the book its title:  the obsession by future Earthlings with keeping Earth’s few actual living animals as domesticated status symbols.  If no organic owls or ostriches or goats or sheep or cats or whatever are available, then one settles for perfect electronic replicas in order to deceive ones neighbors.  This goes on interminably.  The other major discarded plot point is the widespread obsession by post-disaster Earthlings with a “religion” called Mercerism, about which the less said the better.

Dialing in the mood organ

There are two items, at least, of 1968 interest that were neglected or dropped by the movie-makers:  The first is the apparently widespread use (at least among well-off humans unfortunate enough to have to remain on the wretched Earth, instead of emigrating “off-world”) of the “Penfield  mood organ.”  This handy home device provides “artificial brain stimulation.”  Mastering the settings of the mood organ console takes a bit of practice:  In the novel’s first scene, Decker is having a testy encounter with his bored wife (named “Iran” for some reason).  ”At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument.”  During her boring day, Iran had decided to try out a few hours of despair, followed by dialing the organ’s setting to “481: Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future.”   Rick suggests they try dialing 888: “the desire to watch TV no matter what’s on.”  These scenes go on in an unmistakably satirical vein, with Dick clearly sending up the 1960s’ burgeoning tendency toward mood-altering drugs and therapies.

“Kippleization”

Another feature of this future America that pointedly to refer to the 1960s and the decade’s riotous growth in consumerism  is ”kipple”– the “phildickian” (I can’t take credit for the adjective) term for the accumulation of useless objects in people’s lives.  A character condemned to live alone in vast, abandoned apartment building declares, prophetically:  ”No one can win against kipple. . . . It’s a universal principle:  the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

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Couples: John Updike in 1968

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review about American male novelists and their fictional portrayals (or avoidance of portrayals) of sex had me returning to John Updike’s Couples.  (The NYTBR essay is by Katie Roiphe, and you can read it here: http://bit.ly/92OgMV)

A 1968 shocker

Born in 1932, John Updike died in January 2009.  By 1968, he had already gained a reputation as l’enfant terrible of American letters, on the strength of his first four novels, which included Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).  But Couples was — like a lot of other things that happened in 1968– a real shocker.  It is filled with exceedingly graphic sex scenes, but since it’s Updike, the scenes are richly drawn, complicated, on a sentence level dazzling and satisfying, though ultimately kind of wearying, too.

What becomes of the “greatest generation”?

The novel is set in the village of Tarbox, outside Boston, during the years of the tragically brief Kennedy administration. There is so much detail about politics and current events at the endless cocktail parties you can almost date the chapters precisely:  the USS Thresher disaster; the death of the newborn Kennedy baby; and a lengthy, boozy, and irreverent party on the night of the JFK assassination.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around a set of 6 or 8 (I lost track) married couples– most of them in their 30s,  making them the tail end of the “greatest generation.”  Some of the men are World War II veterans; most of them are college-educated (including the women); and some of the men commute into Boston or Cambridge for work.  There are children, of course, but the adults don’t seem all that interested in them.

“A black mass of community sex.”

The milieu of Tarbox (widely assumed to be Updike’s Ipswich MA by another name) is not quite suburban, not exactly Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit territory, but close, very close.    Television’s Mad Men comes to mind, though Updike has almost no interest in the work life of men and much more interest in fornication.  The title could well be “Coupling,” given the novel’s virtually un-mappable network of marital infidelities, all of them within the tight confines of “the group” of couples.  The affairs are supposedly clandestine, but it’s clear that “everyone” knows about everybody else’s business in this fishbowl.  As TIME magazine’s editors put it:   “The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike’s couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex.”

Couples– and the sensation it caused–landed Updike on the cover of TIME on April 26, 1968.  (Updike’s second TIME cover came in October 1982, after his third “Rabbit” novel, Rabbit is Rich, received the Pulitzer Prize.) The extent, the casualness, and the voraciousness of the dalliances truly astonished American readers–and, in fact, I was also more than a little incredulous.  ”This is my parents’ generation,” I thought to myself:  ”Was this really going on?”  (Probably not, I assumed: the class/religious differences probably meant that my parents’ circle of couples–Catholic, working-class, “traditional”–was more chaste.  But . . . doubts linger.)

Tarbox and the material world

There is such a wealth of period detail in Couples!  It’s as if Updike had set himself the task of delineating a precise place and time– the minutiae of household decor, of dress and hairstyles, of music (the couples play records and dance in their living rooms at parties).  The couples engage in tedious, often inebriated chit-chat about “the world” outside their world, which could mean the next suburb over, or another hemisphere away.  There is talk of the space race, the Cold War, and the barely audible sounds of conflict coming from Vietnam.  And then there is “the Pill,” which–they all acknowledge–has given “everyone” so much freedom to play around.

The novel’s timeline edges just into 1964, and thus misses the upheavals and notorious events of 1968.  Still, Couples still provides a remarkable “picture window” into the affluence, cynicism, and complacencies of the entire postwar era.

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