By Mitch Levenberg
Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode might be my new.favorite book, long essay, poetic narrative, or narrative poem by her yet.
Goblin Mode is comprised of a series of mini chapters, like small inhalations, gasps of observations and speculations, a breathing in and out of the world as she experiences it, as she brings us closely along with her, a journey she states, paraphrasing Joey Soloway, “that moves less in an arc and more in spirals or circles.” “To answer these questions,” she continues, “I seek out muses, memory places, and the architecture of our insides and outsides.” This book can really start anywhere or end anywhere. “In my end is my beginning,” as Eliot says.
We first meet the Goblin as early as Chapter 2: “One day this Goblin came to me and said, write straight from your body … ust open your skin and pours whatever comes out onto the page—blood, guts, what have you I took it a step further,” she says “and invited you in. It was so sexy.”
That’s an invitation that’s hard for any reader to resist. That’s probably why I enjoy reading and reviewing Caroline Hagood’s books so much. I feel a stake in it. There is little distance between us. I enjoy crowding into her mind, becoming another one of her thoughts, thoughts so close to each other she thinks her brain must have body odor.
Hagood narrates at the same time as she confides. She’ll even apologize for bad jokes or even going off the topic or (is it possible?) swerving slightly off the topic.
But for me there is no topic I don’t want her to swerve away to. I follow the ride, the journey, her Coney Island roller coaster of the mind.
Of course, Hagood is never dogmatic or peremptory in her observations, but always conscious of narrative reliability, but letting the reader see what she means, as wild and otherworldly her observations and speculations might be, in her brilliant metaphors, her molecular descriptions (her poetic mode) and her quirky, ironic, often poignant storytelling (her narrative mode).
She does not like to be “boxed in,” labeled, categorized. Focus can get monotonous, in both form and creativity. It’s not natural; it defies life itself or how a writer restructures or reforms life through the act of writing. For her, writing, in all its myriads of forms, structure, intention, should reflect the very uncertainties of life, its rude limitations, its lurking dangers but also its endless possibilities for love and redemption. And it is the creative mind, the mind in creation, that should fight against the gravitational pull of literary restriction. “I used to feel bad about all I didn’t write,”: she says in one of her revelatory moments.
“About all the books I didn’t finish. All the things I didn’t do. But now I see that
Everything I read—full books and fragments, student papers, lit submissions, parking
Signs, status updates, receipts, recipes, notes on bar napkins—and even everything
I didn’t write lives inside of me as this enormous unruly, best book of all time. We are
We are all these strange archives.”
“Even Whitman,” Hagood writes, “fantasized in his journals about mixing forms so that the stage directions of his imagined play could appear as poetry. His musing reflects the plight of all writers dreaming of transcending language altogether, giving readers an experience so complete, it’s not of words at all, much less limited by one genre.”
Finally, when discussing Carmen Maria Machado’s book In the Dream House, Hagood states,
Mind you though, this book covers traumatic territory, it’s also a blast to read. Fun though it might be, it’s built on weighty ideas, and this gives it a paradoxical flare … but all against the backdrop of deeper narrative and cultural theories … Machado gave all sorts of different reasons for the fragmentary structure but, she said, it eventually came down to this, you can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do. To tell the story of being disassembled often requires new textual approaches that may even appear to disassemble themselves.
It’s both difficult and pointless to say what this book is exactly about. It is not exactly about anything though, at times, it seems to be a little bit about everything. It is certainly about Love. It is about the courage to endure in a world fraught with fear and danger. It is about the Goblin in all of us that stiffens our spiritual spine and helps us survive in an uncertain, unpredictable world. Her mind reminds me of Hamlet’s nutshell. “Oh, God,” he says, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and still consider myself king of infinite space.” Her heart and her mind, of course, both Shakespearean nutshells definitely have room for everyone and everything, past, present and future: Life, death, her parents, the subway (kind of a modern-day Hades) the subway riders like the woman who touches her ear lobe three times in a row and thinks how if she loved that woman, that would be the gesture she would love best), the students, lyrical and beaded essays, bioluminescence, in Puerto Rico, stalkers and flashers who either actually flash or have the potential to flash, wise and comforting coffee vendors, friendly Whitmanesque cab drivers, eccentric professors like myself, who set up their offices in diners, of ghosts of the soul, … monsters of the mind, goblins of the heart.
And let’s not forget those co-protagonists, Hagood’s amazing kids. Prodigies of the Art Monster, those “ketchup-fingered” little intimations of immortality, of primal sympathy, those wonderful, wayward, Wordsworthian kids, part and parcel of the narrator herself, the straws who stir the writer’s imagination. And it’s near the end of her journey when she begins to hear strange noises from her furnace which might indeed be a “poltergeist situation.” Hagood, the “Goblin Mother,” worried about the fears of her own children, “of the very real terrors of being alive, such as suffering, or the flashing end of this life ahead of us all … nobody knows what happens when we die,” she says, “but some people do think we go to a wonderful place.” And then, in an amazing, goblinesque moment of speculation, for any such speculation can only exist with a good Goblin behind it, she concludes,
The act of imagining for them” says Hagood, “this space was another way of writing, but writing with them as protagonists—their wonderful wouldn’t be my wonderful, so how to imagine myself into their imaginations? It was another form of time and space travel in the name of love.
And no doubt if anyone can pull it off, I imagine very deeply that Caroline Hagood can.
MITCH LEVENBERG has published essays and short fiction in such journals as The Common Review, Fiction, The New Delta Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Assisi Journal of the Arts, Local Knowledge, The Same, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants,” was published in 2006. He teaches writing and literature at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and two dogs.