IV. Carlos in the Realms of DiscourseThree Faces of Carlos Richard de Mille 27 Sergeant Castaneda and the Photos of don Juan: Transforming the Special Consensus A\ tegend aspiring in his ov time does well to cultivate an obscure oF ‘inaccurate biography. Following don Juan’s advice to create a fog around himself, Castaneda let Time photograph him peeping between pudgy fingers, hiding under a pork-pe hat, twinkling atop Angelo Orona’s dis- sertation, never full face. As shown in the illustration, he partly erased his personal image, drawn for Psychology Today by Dick Oden. That year, Oden said, Carlos was living “in a van with lots of tape record. ings,” though Castaneda's dissertation would say, “I was not permitted to tape record or photograph any event,” while A Separate Reality had ‘twice said: “Ttumed on my tape recorder.” For the first time here it can bbe revealed that Carlos's tape recorder is equipped with a special attach- ment to create a fog around him. Tn spite of the erasure, Oden's drawing did resemble Castaneda, as one can see by comparing it with Schlesinger’s naturalistic portrait in Chapter ‘Two. The metamorphosis of Carlos was accomplished mainly on the cover of Time, where a squarish European visage contracted into a round-headed Filipino-looking desert. Five years later Psychology Today ‘got another crack at shaping the legend, as Time's rice farmer merged ‘with Oden’s taxi driver to become a most unlikely adolescent Spanish aristocrat, right eye partly restored, name boldly procaiming a false identity. A fan who went looking for Carlos Castaneda with this peculiar princeling in hand would certainly not have recognized the literary commoner who tumed up on Memorial Day weekend 1979 at the ‘American Booksellers’ Assocation convention in Los Angeles. Accom- panied by Harlan Kessel of the University of California Press, the celeb- rated nondescript was wearing a tan leisure suit with shirt in muted checks. Sources say he hobnobbed with Jerzy Kosinski, but nobody saw don Juan. Neil Erickson recommends looking under Carlos's hat to find don Juan, but my informant says Castaneda wasn’t wearing a hat. So ‘much for facts The legend is more entertaining. ‘A warrior intent on mastering personal history would not be satisfied to keep his name out of the biographical dictionaries; he would submit his name along with false information. Marquis's Who's Who in 243