PARTISAN REVIEW
479
stare at a patch of fog for hours, to sew up the mouth and eyes of a
lizard and let it go, to listen without thinking verbally, to take peyote,
datura, and mushrooms of the genus
Psylocebe
which sicken and ter–
rify him. He is told one thing one moment and another, quite contra–
dictory, the next. His visions are treated with respect and then ridiculed.
He is the butt of humor, of practical joke. He is tricked into becom–
ing a sorcerer as don Juan was tricked. "I've told you already," don
Juan tells him at one point, "only a crackpot would undertake the
task of becoming a man of knowledge. A sober-headed man has to be
tricked into doing it."
There is an element of the clown, the trickster, in don Juan and
especially in his Mazatec friend don Genaro. Don Juan takes Casta–
neda to visit don Genaro in central Mexico. They spend several days
collecting plants. Castaneda is encouraged to talk to the plants; he feels
stupid. At one point - don Juan is telling don Genaro that his ap–
prentice has seen "the lights of death" - don Genaro rolls on the floor
in laughter and then, suddenly, stands on his head without the use of
his hands, his legs crossed comically above him. A few minutes later–
they are still talking about death - don Genaro widens his nostrils to
twice their normal size in imitation of Castaneda, whose nostrils evi–
dently dilate slightly when he takes notes. "What was most comical
about his clowning was not so much his gestures as his own reactions to
them," Castaneda says. "After he enlarged his nostrils he tumbled down ,
laughing, and worked his body again into the same strange, sitting-on–
his-head, upsidedown posture." The clowning eventually disorients Cas–
taneda to the point that he is on the verge of seeing, of experiencing a
sort of fleeting Heraclitean-Bergsonian world that resists description. He
watches don Genaro perform impossible, acrobatic feats over a waterfall,
make the earth rumble, and later cause his locked car to disappear.
Tricksters and clowns - Jung noticed this - resemble shamans
and sorcerers. The
istrioni,
the histrions, of the commedia dell'arte, Bel–
trame da Milano tells us, were often considered
stregoni,
sorcerers. They
are perennial outsiders. Don Juan states: "I personally like the ultimate
freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast certainty."
They are dangerous. They are entertainers, tempters, seducers. (There
is something of this in the role the pygmies play for the villagers.) In
the West the clown leads us to question decorum and conventions; don
Juan and don Genaro - they are professional metaphysicians - play
with reality itself. They force Castaneda to question his ontology, his
world view, to experience (the fear of) chaos. They offer him another
