The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation

7. From the Substrate: Notes on the Work of Michael McClure

7 From the Substrate: Notes on the lfiJrk of Michael McClure Let that which stood in front go behind! andlet that which was behindadvance to thefront andspeak. Walt Whitman "Respondez!" Extravagant, extreme, even excessive: the writings of Michael McClure aim at nothing less than a rediscovery and a redefinition of humankind. McClure's work is essentially alchemical: a process of reconciliation and transmutation. Beginning with the apparent contradictions ofmind and body - mysticism and materialism, spirituality and sensuality, atavism and transcendence, human and nonhuman, energy and structure-the poet forges a new harmony and wholeness, a new coherence. McClure's poems, plays, and prose are the record of his struggle for personal liberation and ofhis evolving bio-alchemical vision. The following notes represent an attempt to trace the main direction and the major developments of his work over the last thirty years. The most convenient and appropriate point at which to begin a consideration ofMichael McClure's oeuvre is his autobiographical novel, The Mad Cub. The book presents an account of the poet's adolescence and young manhood and ofhis crucial passage through a prolonged and acute mental-physical and metaphysical crisis to a state ofself-renewal and the affirmation of a secular faith, a faith in life. McClure's bildungsroman, 105 Daybreak Boys his portrait of the artist, is in many respects a key to his work, providing an introduction to his concerns, his imagery, and his vision. As the title implies, the central imagery ofThe MadCub is drawn from the animal world. Throughout the book, the narrator, Pete, likens himselfand the other characters to various beasts, including pigs, goats, horses, bulls, wolves, calves, and rats. The numerous animal similes serve to convey, the essential theme of the novel: human beings are mammals. This assertion is by no means as simple as it may at first seem. It serves as the foundation ofMcClure's vision. For the narrator it provides a release from his physical afflictions, from his neurasthenia, his alienation , his despair;, and his madness"and it represents the principal datum for a new orientation to his own life and the life of the world. Predominant among the animal images in the text is that of the lion, which is employed as a metaphor both for superconsciousness/divinity and for authentic identity, full physio-psychic being: "God is a vast robed figure ofbeauty who moves in space and simultaneously is space. He has a gentle maniacal face like a lion's. . . ."1 ''1'm sick of all the things that have held me down and dragged me and disgusted me with life.... I want to grow and become the lion I truly am" (79). With its heraldic, mythological, and astrological associations, the image of the lion serves to unite the individual and the universal, the microcosm and the macrocosm. The development of the narrator from "mad cub" to "lion consciousness " (123) is finally achieved by a summoning forth of beast consciousness by means of "growling and imitating an animal and roaring" (156). Following this cathartic experience, the narrator is at last capable ofselfunderstanding and self-acceptance and of the untrammeled expression of love for others, especially for his wife and daughter whose affections he has abused and alienated in the rage and pain of his sickness. His final vision of, and joyous identification with, the physical-metaphysical processes of the cosmos is expressed as a poem. The narrator rhapsodizes and celebrates a sense of sacramental unity with stars and nebulae, with mountains ~nd trees, and (as in Joyce's Ulysses) he concludes his paean with a grand, universal affirmation: "YES". The situation of Pete in The Mad Cub-"suspicious of everyone" (5), false, competitive, self-destructive, obsessed with sex, unable to express or to accept love, frustrated and blocked with unrealized potential-may 106 Notes on McClttre be seen as emblematic of the human condition in general, perhaps more especially in Western culture. Pete's salvation through mammal consciousness is more, then, than a personal solution, it is a proposal for a transformation of human consciousness. To resist and arrest the psychic disintegration of man and to redeem and realize true human nature involves, for McClure, reclaiming our animal identity, coming to terms with the prelogical, primitive spirit of the senses, the unconscious, the body. The Mad Cub provides a precis of McClure's themes, as well as a compendium of motifs and images which are further...