Obsidian Situations: A Review | Sandra Huber
December 5, 2024
Anteism Books, 2023
The softer side of object relations is the experience of all matter as alive, is the feeling of potential transference with all beings through transient, aleatory associations prone to dissolving before one’s eyes, is to love only a temporary mother, is to mourn her loss indelibly.
– Tricia Middleton, Obsidian Situations
Opening the first pages of Tricia Middleton’s debut novel Obsidian Situations is like unzipping a well-kept secret or embarking on a decadent drunken derive or running your fingers down the body of a long-forgotten lover you hate to love with the taste of one too many Calvados on your tongue. Middleton’s words jump out at the reader, printed in a sky-blue font, carrying fragments of myth, philosophy, psychoanalysis, spirits, bygone eras, deliciously scathing takedowns of the art world, diaristic diatribes, asides, laments, divulgences. What is the book about? This question seems a disservice to the state of mind or atmosphere it conjures: an either tipsy or hungover protagonist traipses through the streets of Paris through ill-fated and toxic love affairs, through the death of her mother, through the voices of bees or cats or whores or literary figures or nutrients in the soil.
The slippery way that Middleton’s unnamed protagonist is swept into the echoes and chaos of a city she briefly inhabits but does not belong to is reflected in the book’s resistance to being pinned down to a plotline or theme. Perhaps the “softer side of object relations” is to embrace the fleetingness of all aliveness, including our own. Middleton’s object relations come through the felt world, where the reader and their experience is directly implicated from the first line of the prologue: “I wonder how you are experiencing your own body right now.” What is the experience of you? What is the experience of I? Obsidian Situations skews these questions in a game of transience and transference.
Tricia Middleton, Trous, 2018, mixed media | image: courtesy of the artist
Middleton is an artist of the play of surfaces, technicolour, tactility, texture, still-life and movement alike. Though this is her literary debut, she is established as a large-scale installation and textile artist, with past exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and more. Middleton works lavishly with layers of fabric and wax and everyday objects that take the viewer into a veiled, at once revealing and concealing world that is never what it seems, such as her installation, Trous (2018) above. As she writes in Obsidian Situations, “I am making an argument for sensation itself as the most pertinent art practice of any age.” This is how her novel reads, multilayered and double-lensed, either through the visions of her ethereal and cutting protagonist or through how the reader constantly moves between desires and scenes as if through back alleyways or forgotten streets. “To be a foundling is to be professionally lost,” her protagonist declares, delving in and out of situations and meditations, at times heartbreaking, as when she says, “Ghost Mom, that Turret will give you anything” – or hilarious, as when she remarks, “Ask anyone here about how their syphilis situation is going, and I am sure you will hear the same reply: ‘Not Well.’” She is raw and relatable, noting, “Every man I went to bed with here, or even considered going to bed with, has put his hands around my neck . . . as if I would enjoy this.” The reader is invited into these intensities while also remaining outside them, as the protagonist often shifts into the voice of the writer or documenter of her own worlds: “I perform this act of a corroborated existence too,” she notes in an insect-like way, “recording incongruent phenomena as best I can.”
Anne Vallayer-Coster, Still-Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals, 1769, oil on canvas
The visual artist in Middleton comes through not only in the way that she writes, but also in her subject matter. French painter Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Still-Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals (1769) makes an appearance as the protagonist is seized by voices of “assembled spirits” at the palais du Louvre. The sensuous fleshy conch shell in the painting, the spirits declare, achieved L’Origine du monde a century in advance of Gustave Courbet. Vallayer-Coster’s Tuft occupies a subversive position among the many paintings of half-clad women by male painters in the halls of the Louvre – it is a covert insurrection of the typical grabby gaze, while remaining seductive and dark in its own underwater terrain. Vallayer-Coster’s Still-Life provides a visual reference for the book as a whole as Middleton plants her protagonist and her reader in the secretive and lusty reefs of inhuman worlds.
I asked Tricia Middleton what her influences for Obsidian Situations were since the book is filled with so many romps and allusions – they include Linda Lê’s Slander (1996), Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928), Anne Carson’s Grief Lessons (2008), Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971), and Diderot’s critical work (18th c.). I would add Violette Leduc, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lisa Robertson, and Corina Copp as literary predecessors, if not actually, at least energetically. This is not to exhaust Middleton’s future reader with references to go in search of, but to further enliven the landscape of ghosts, both living and dead, that resonate throughout these pages.
Obsidian Situations is a mad efflorescence. It is a book for those of us who are thrilled by words and the full expansive possibilities of novels that never meant to be novels, but rather perfume vials, shadows, sensations. This book will not placate you, it will rivet you. Replete with spirits (ethereal and alcoholic), it is a spirit-full and inspirited text. I recommend reading Obsidian Situations at dawn or in a bar or at a fountain garden or with a candle burning at midnight.
Sandra Huber is an educator, researcher, and writer. She teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University and holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia with a specialization in contemporary witchcraft. She has published and presented on witchcraft, magic, sleep, and dreams in the area of poetics, cinema, media histories, and contemporary art. sandrahuber.com
Tricia Middleton Tricia Middleton is an artist living and working in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. Her visual art has been exhibited widely in monograph and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Canada and abroad, including presentations at such organizations as Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The Power Plant, Artspeak, Mercer Union, Oakville Galleries, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, nGbK, DOC!, Overgaden, Galérie Néon, and Nordnorsk kunstnersenter. She has held international residencies at such places as ISCP and Cité des arts. Obsidian Situations is her first book, published by Documents in 2023. Tricia Middleton is the recipient of a bursary from the Periculum Foundation, awarded to commence work on a second book under the working title Ciphers.
