On losing one’s say: Sophie Cunningham and the geography of desire
By Peter D Mathews

What crime is there in losing one’s way?
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, III.142

Sophie Cunningham’s debut novel, Geography (2004), opens with its protagonist Catherine watching a green sea turtle covering its eggs on a beach in Tangalla, Sri Lanka. Her anxiety about the turtle’s unborn young concentrates around her own fears and insecurities: “It is hard, but necessary, to feel hopeful that it will survive” (1–2). In Sri Lanka, Catherine befriends fellow traveller Ruby, to whom she recounts the long story of her damaged life throughout the novel. Tangalla is not only the starting point of the narrative, but also of a cathartic process of healing, forgiveness and sexual discovery that shifts constantly between Australia, the United States, India and Sri Lanka in a vast geography of desire signalled by the novel’s title. Today Cunningham is regarded as a preeminent ecological author, combining serious concerns about the degradation of the planet with a political awareness of the “geographical articulations” (30), as Edward Said puts it, that define the contested space created by the legacy of colonisation. These ideas are framed by an affective topology articulated long before she began writing about ecology, and it is the refinement of these ideas over time that this essay sets out to explore.

The story that unfolds in Geography, for instance, is a journey of erotic discovery that turns on the contrast between the destructive world of heterosexual desire, represented by Catherine’s obsession with Michael, and the healing possibilities revealed by her queer awakening with Ruby in the book’s closing pages. Catherine describes her cautionary tale as deriving from “the perils of geography” (4), with her initial reactions to Michael’s adopted city of Los Angeles representing her entrance into a fantasy dangerously unmoored from reality. “[I]n Los Angeles you could feel possibilities, the weightlessness of things that are new,” she observes, “I wanted to live here […] and drive around like LA was my very own movie set” (4). Catherine’s relationship with Michael takes on this same fantasy quality, and accordingly he seduces her by driving to a spot overlooking the city, showing her a scene “more beautiful than I had ever imagined it would be” (10).

An expert in epistolary fiction, Michael admires Choderlos Laclos’s novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782) and openly subscribes to the amoral Valmont’s notion that desire and power are the same thing. “People destroy each other,” he tells Catherine. “That is what they do” (12). Repeatedly comparing herself to Valmont’s victim Madame de Tourvel, Catherine’s letters reveal the love affair she conducted with her high school teacher, an emotional precursor to Michael who revealed the hidden eroticism of maps and the spaces of implicit conflict they represent. Cunningham thus maps out the geography of Catherine’s desire: Melbourne is associated with the boundaries of a self confined by familiarity, whereas a place like Los Angeles is a glittering fantasy of escape, an empty promise that leads to her eventual disillusionment. Although she travels to other cities, there is an underlying restlessness to Catherine’s character that no amount of movement can satisfy. In every place she is confronted with the misery of her inescapable self, always transforming the promise of the new into the same old existential trap of her obsession with Michael, the human embodiment of her cinematic fantasies about Los Angeles.

In this respect, Geography is really a novel about Catherine’s bad faith, about her paradoxical willingness to submit to desires that she knows will enslave her, yet which she finds almost impossible to break. Cunningham underlines the contradictory way her protagonist is caught up in these modes of destructive behaviour: “But this is my secret, many women’s secret: there is a darkness in me […] [a] passivity that eats away at me, away at us, but seems like nothing at all” (213). Inspired by various Eastern religions, Catherine contemplates the renunciation of desire as one possible path out of this cycle of harm. Alongside this spiritual solution, she experiences a growing realisation that she needs to embrace her own queerness. Ruby points out to Catherine that she behaves “[a]s if your heterosexuality is normal when it’s totally fucking nuts” (117), providing her with an alternative path to intimacy that contrasts powerfully to the damaging affair with Michael. Ruby’s closing offer of her love ends Catherine’s nihilistic compulsion to flee the present. “All I do know is my travels, this is where they have brought me,” she reflects in the novel’s final lines: “I say to her: ‘I am’” (243). Geography thus closes with Catherine affirming that her relationship with Ruby provides her with a metaphorical life map that mirrors her newly embraced sexual orientation. The discovery of Catherine and Ruby’s mutual love represents a promise of happiness that avoids real-life complications by being displaced into the imagined realm of the happily ever after.

Yet desire is not so easily tamed, as becomes painfully clear in Cunningham’s later writings when the drama moves away from this erotic context. Consider Cunningham’s non-fiction work Melbourne (2011), for instance, in which she ponders her home city by charting the passing seasons across the year 2009. In the same way that Catherine in Geography invests different locations with varying emotions, so too in Melbourne Cunningham presents the city as a primarily mental landscape: “Sometimes it’s wildlife, plants, people and birds that fill Melbourne up but a place can also be thick with meaning — what Melbourne writer Maria Tumarkin calls a traumascape” (230). There is a useful comparison to be made between the emotional drama that Catherine recounts in Geography and the traumas inflicted on the Melbourne landscape. Catherine’s proclivity for pain during sex with Michael, for instance, finds its metaphorical parallel in Cunningham’s description of the abattoirs that once drained their bloody waste into the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers: “There is a violent poetry in this image of the river, and if you see an aerial photo of Melbourne’s rivers, creeks, swamps and billabongs they actually look like arteries, veins and capillaries” (138). The diegetic space of Melbourne expands beyond a single, limited perspective to take in the collective dramas of desire inscribed onto the landscape. Cunningham the ecological writer thus faces a very different challenge to that of her earlier fictional protagonist; whereas Catherine creates her own individually tailored solace by adjusting the life parameters that fall within her control, closing herself off from her unhealthy desires and rechannelling them toward Ruby, such choices are not possible when it comes to the management of an entire city. Melbourne is marked by a geography of desire whereby collective decisions have been violently carved onto its body that a solitary author is relatively powerless to change.

The “traumascape” of Melbourne that emerges from the pages of Cunningham’s book constitutes a crisscrossing map of imperial impositions and revolutionary counter-moves produced by the restless path of conflicting desires over time. The earliest discernible marks on this map derive not from the hands of human beings, but from the contingent flows and fluxes that mark the natural world. Cunningham reminds the reader that the land on which Melbourne is situated was originally a “broad wetlands” (25) that, after the establishment of the city, caused regular flooding: “These wetlands sit in the heart of Melbourne and I like to think that heart still beats, albeit weakly, creating a gentle pulse” (25). Cunningham notes how the prevailing attitude since colonisation has been to impose solutions to this flooding grounded in a mixture of arrogance and ignorance:

It is symptomatic of Melbourne’s attitude towards the Yarra that shifting a waterway that had been cutting its way through volcanic rock for over 300 million years was seen as more straightforward than diverting an as-yet-unbuilt freeway. […] Something of the stubbornness and recalcitrance of the river’s spirit is captured in a Wurundjeri version of its creation, in which its beds are formed by the heels of a young boy who is being dragged along the ground by an angry old man. After white settlement the river kept fighting, and there were notable floods in Melbourne in 1839, 1848, 1863, 1891, 1934, 1972 and 1989. […] This regular flooding was a direct result of the profound lack of understanding about how water moved through the land before it was developed (117–118).

Cunningham points out that the city’s planners were ultimately forced to capitulate to the land’s already-established paths. “If you open a Melway street directory from the late sixties it’s the creek lines that are overlaid with broken lines, signifying the possibility of development,” she observes, “and nowadays almost all Melbourne’s freeways trace the path of a creek run underground” (226). Just beneath the imperial surface of Melbourne’s streets, therefore, Cunningham detects a subversive counter-discourse bubbling away.

This metaphor culminates around the halfway point of Melbourne when Cunningham takes a tour of the underground drains below the inner-city suburb of Hawthorn. For this undertaking, she seeks the guidance of Dougo, an experienced underground explorer, and together with her friend Jeff, they navigate their way through a system that first began construction in the 1880s. “Something about walking under a city brings out the history nerd in people, and moving slowly down into the tunnel system becomes a personal excavation of sorts,” writes Cunningham, “As you pass from modern concrete drains to bluestone cobbling and on into older, circular red-brick sections, you feel the passage of history and time” (150). This labyrinth of drains below the surface of the city is mirrored, in turn, by the laneways that weave their way through the city. Melbourne’s laneways are “neatly Freudian,” notes Cunningham, “a metaphor built of bitumen and bluestone, in which the conscious (the grid) tried to repress the subconscious (laneways),” and at this level “the subconscious has won, really,” since they are the true source of “Melbourne’s new-found vitality” (202). This return of the repressed exposes not only the fragility of the city’s colonial order, but also reiterates the extent to which physical geography is shaped by the unconscious fissures of desire.

The appearance of this psychoanalytic language in Cunningham’s work is worth tracing, as it returns with some force in her book City of Trees (2019). The central theme of that work is humanity’s relationship to the environment as seen through the treatment of trees, a destructive cycle that echoes, on a global scale, the connection between Catherine and Michael in Geography. “A tree is never just a tree,” argues Cunningham, “It speaks of the history of the place […] of the displacement of first nations. Of the endless lust of governments (small and large) to control places and the ways in which trees should or should not grow, the ways in which humans should or should not live” (7). As Cunningham travels to different places, she finds the tragic scenario of arboreal degradation being replicated across the globe. The desire of modern humanity is characterised by a universal death drive, it would seem, that has the world “falling off a cliff in slow motion” (13).

Freud famously illustrated his concept of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) by observing his young grandson, Ernst, playing with a cotton reel. When throwing the reel out of his cot, the little boy would call out the word “fort!” (“gone!”), and when his mother would retrieve it for him he would exclaim “da!” (“there!”). Cunningham pointedly reuses this example in her essay “Fort. Da!” to meditate on the extinction of the thylacine:

I know what a thylacine looks like because of the devastating footage I saw of the last one in captivity, a thylacine called Benjamin, running back and forth in his enclosure in 1933. […] On September 7, 1936, some 30 million years after the fossil record suggests thylacine first walked the earth, Benjamin was left out of his enclosure one cold night and died of exposure. At the board meeting following Benjamin’s death the Hobart Zoo set aside thirty pounds to replace him.

Da!

Only to discover that no more thylacine were to be found.

Fort. (191–192)

The crucial point here is not merely the devastating fact of extinction, of the disappearance of the thylacine from an island where it was once so abundant. Rather, it is the recurrence of that peculiar human tendency to push desire beyond the limits of rational satisfaction, which transforms passions into monstrous and self-destructive compulsions. Freud’s designation of this impulse as the “beyond” of the pleasure principle reflects its ambivalent place in the geography of desire: such desires may seem to come from outside, yet we also recognise in them the darker sides of ourselves.

Cunningham’s most powerful confrontation with this ambivalence in City of Trees occurs in “The Age of Loneliness”, an essay that opens with a reflection on an Indian elephant named Ranee, a gift made by the King of Siam in 1883. Although ostensibly about elephants, the piece’s emotional core derives from the passing of her stepfather, John Cunningham, just as she began researching this essay, and the onset of dementia in her biological father, Peter Nicholls. The latter’s physical decline and death lead her to reconsider her lifelong habit of “finding patterns in seemingly random events” (287):

A few months later, when a friend read a draft of this essay she commented, “It’s really about repressed grief, isn’t it?” And I was horrified. Not because she was wrong, but because I don’t want to suggest that the natural death of a parent is in any way akin to the grief that we may soon live in a world where there will be no elephants left in the wild. Loss, and grief, can feel like many strands or like one large knot. […] I don’t want to make Ranee’s story more meaningful by generating a shape to her life that is pleasing. I do not want to give in to the siren song of a resolved narrative. One that makes sense of what humans are doing to this planet, or what the passage of time does to us (287).

These meditations in City of Trees mark a change in Cunningham’s thinking that is rooted in a recognition that the beyond of the pleasure principle brings grief and trauma that cannot be smoothed over by anti-depressants or Buddhist meditation. Instead, she comes to embrace and acknowledge the unavoidable role of contingency in shaping our lives. “As I get older, I no longer try to find meaning in order so much as draw meaning from randomness,” she writes, “I feel this strongly: things are both random and connected, all the time” (55). Cunningham thus expresses in City of Trees a fresh suspicion of the imposition of neatness and order on the chaotic flow of life and history, a profound doubt that a map exists that can safely guide us through the perils of the geography of desire.

This new outlook provides important context for Cunningham’s latest novel This Devastating Fever (2022). Based on the life of Leonard Woolf, its protagonist, Alice Fox, follows the numerous tangents of Woolf’s labyrinthine existence, from the sixty thousand documents in his personal archive, to the clues she gleans from her journeys to significant places in his life, such as Monk House in East Sussex and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. Like Cunningham, Alice produces numerous versions of the novel, none of which cohere into a satisfying form:

There were versions of the novel in which Alice, inspired by The Avalanches album Since I Left You, and Dadaism, tried to write the novel as a series of samples, or cut ups. She then tried for straight historical but almost died of boredom. Literary styles moved in, and out, of fashion: Realist, magical realist, grunge, metafiction, autofiction, historical, rhetorical, satirical, postcolonial, feminist, fantasy, sci-fi. Software evolved […] Prime ministers, presidents, they came, they went […] Hardware evolved […] The United Kingdom joined the European Union. The United Kingdom left the European Union. Pets were born, were loved, lived, died. Drafts unfurled over years, over decades, Alice let a thousand flowers bloom, wore out the soil, and, to continue the metaphor, added fertiliser. (9)

While mocking her own struggles with writing, Cunningham is also echoing here the experimental middle chapter in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which the slow, detailed portrait of the Ramsay family and their guests suddenly speeds up, with years zooming by in just a few pages. This Devastating Fever is a novel that becomes more lost with each new permutation that Alice produces, until she has a sudden revelation while reading a line from one of Leonard’s letters: “she had to let her facts get out of control” (117). Unlike Catherine in Geography, who longs for a map to show her the way forward, Alice discovers a new pleasure in losing herself through the act of wandering.

The result of this change is a novel that takes familiar elements from Cunningham’s previous writings, such as her tendency to draw on details from her own biography, and reworks them in a dramatically new way. Her fictional stand-in is named Alice, for instance, in part because it is her middle name, but also because of the dreamlike features that are borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). These surreal elements destabilise the reality of the narrative, allowing the “geography of Alice’s daydream” (182) to shift in ways that suggest the predominance of a mental rather than a physical landscape. “Places that were a long way away and been visited a long time ago,” she muses at one point, “Maybe she’d dreamed these places? Maybe she’d made them up?” (283). Cunningham likewise echoes the traumatic story of her father’s physical decline told in City of Trees in the character of Helena “Hen” Aetós, a neighbour who was a substitute parent for Alice and her siblings when they were growing up. Some clever Carrollesque wordplay emerges from these choices: not only does Alice’s last name, Fox, chime with that of her subject in Leonard Woolf (Wolf), it also leads the ailing Hen to point out another juxtaposition: “‘Fox,’ she hissed. ‘Hen. Fox’” (135). Cunningham thus self-consciously detaches these elements drawn from her own life from their origins in the real world, allowing them to wander off, beyond her control, into the landscape of the unconscious.

A crucial effect of this strategy is to destabilise not only space but also time, as Alice finds herself shifting wildly between historical moments. One notable slippage occurs, for example, when Alice takes a walk in the South Downs near Monk House, the country home of the Woolfs. This area is famous for its chalk cliffs and grasslands, formed over centuries by the grazing habits of animals like sheep and rabbits, features that have been endangered by the introduction of modern farming methods in the middle of the twentieth century. On this day, however, Alice “finally moved into a landscape that had not changed for centuries […] The sense that nothing had changed, the beauty, the height, made her feel vertiginous. This, this, was why she walked” (25). Through her dizziness, Alice looks down to the ocean and rocks below and notices two sets of clothes lying folded on the beach. She then overhears a conversation between two men about how war has broken out, making it clear that time has shifted back to 1914. One of the men is Leonard Woolf and Alice, in her mind’s eye, follows him on a humiliating visit to the enlistment office to seek an exemption. The section ends with Alice waking up on the beach, unsure whether the vision was a dream, knowing only that she “had a long way to go before she reached her destination” (29). At other moments in the novel, these slippages occur with disorienting speed: after she receives a COVID-19 vaccination, for instance, Alice is told in quick succession by a nurse that it is 1919, then by a man in rags that she is actually in 1930, only to be contradicted by “a softly spoken woman, dressed in an RAAF uniform” (249), who insists that it is 1942 (249), after which Alice abruptly returns to the present.

Another slippage occurs late in the novel after Alice witnesses an injured kangaroo shot to death, an event from 2021 that transports her back to Sri Lanka. There, she witnesses the flamingos that Leonard so admired, great flocks that have now been reduced to “only a few dozen” (290), but as time shifts backwards to 2010, then 1960, and finally 1910, the birds multiply, their wings “[c]utting through time” (291). In this way, Alice wanders not only through a mental landscape, but also a temporality that is subjective and slippery, shaped by the treacherous contours of desire. What these shifts in spatial and temporal perspective achieve is a discourse from beyond the geography of desire. In this respect, This Devastating Fever is a considered reversal of the logic of Geography, in which Catherine revisits the errors of her past to create a roadmap toward an implied future with Ruby. The energy that motivated this earlier desire derived from the anticipation that the possibility of happiness would be fulfilled just after the conclusion of the narrative. The later Cunningham short-circuits this dynamic by foregrounding Leonard Woolf, whose life, despite its considerable length and numerous twists, has irrefutably come to an end: he always speaks from the beyond in the novel, forever a ghost.

Implicit in this gesture is a refutation of the Bloomsbury group’s desire to turn their backs on the compromised past, to “present a new vision” (269) to the world. The counterpoint elaborated by This Devastating Fever implies that the structures and paradigms of history are largely unruffled by the restlessness of individual human desire, articulating the bitter wisdom that humanity has proven itself incapable of learning from even its worst mistakes. The endless repetition of negative events, the defining mark of the beyond of the pleasure principle, confirms the validity of this mindset: “Sexual trauma. War. Political upheaval. Environmental destruction. Radical gender politics. All happened then. All happening now” (155). Cunningham’s rage about the foolishness and self-destructiveness of humanity causes her to look beyond her own species to nature, in particular to the trees, for hope and inspiration. “I pledge my allegiance to you,” she writes at the end of City of Trees, “to this city — to our planet — of trees” (304), an arboreal world defined by a peace that comes from existing beyond the twisted geographies of human desire.

It is conventional to think of losing one’s way as an error to be avoided, but when examined closely Cunningham’s reversals reflect a deeply considered wisdom that can be seen emerging in modern thought. In “Hashish in Marseille” (1928), for instance, Walter Benjamin records how he would take the drug and then wander through the city, unfolding “the narrative of a labyrinthine passage” (Shapiro 2003: 67) in which the whole point was to lose himself in the flood of new sensations provided by his surroundings. Rebecca Solnit recounts in A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), an important influence on City of Trees, how Virginia Woolf was prone to a similar impulse. “For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity,” she observes, “a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are” (16). Not only is there no crime in losing one’s way, but Benjamin, Woolf, and now Cunningham share the recognition of its peculiar virtue; rejecting the teleological idea that there is a roadmap that can save the world from itself. Catherine’s geography teacher was right: the creation of any map is an act of implicit colonisation that gives rise to the treacherous belief that the geography of desire can be made to bend to the contours of the rational order. The growing prominence of an ecological critique in Cunningham’s work has thus required, over the course of her work, a parallel rejection of this rigidly teleological mindset, allowing her to embrace in new and liberating ways the flows and contingencies that guide her freedom to wander.

Works Cited

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