from Rob Hardy -- a review of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseilles

There are explorations that take us to new worlds, and the explorers come back ready to tell us of all the strange people and artifacts they saw.  There is also the exploration of a familiar world in a new way, and that this can be just as enlightening, and entertaining, is the message of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago Books) by husband and wife Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop.  Cortázar was a fiction writer and Dunlop a writer, translator, and photographer, and they had planned for years to get away from the demons of Paris.  The demons included various ills of modern life, like the telephone and even cutlery: “When we asked of the knives only that they cut a peach or the cheese, they arranged to bite us and, while we did acrobatics to avoid their teeth, their friends the forks came from below to jab us.”  It was not the South Seas that drew them away, or the Amazon, but a stretch of freeway they had traveled many times before, but no one had traveled it the way they were going to.  The 465-mile Autoroute du Sud gets drivers from Paris to Marseilles in just a few hours, but they would make an expedition of it, staying on the autoroute while they stopped at every rest area along it, at the rate of two rest stops a day, a trip that would take just over a month, starting in May 1982.  They wrote this book about it shortly thereafter, and it has just now been translated into English by Anne McLean.  I can’t say anything about the fidelity of the translation, but the words are full of whimsy and magic, and they fit the theme perfectly.

Cortázar and Dunlop may have had a light and whimsical view of the outing, but they took it very seriously, which simply increases the sense of fun they report here.  Provisions were planned with care, as were the re-supply caravans from friends who met them along the route.  They planned the trip to be secret; an excursion of this type by an author as famous and beloved as Cortázar would have been ruined by any press attention.  Only a few of their friends knew about it, “divided from the beginning into two antagonistic camps, those who simply thought them mad and those who preferred to include them in the category of idiots.”  They knew they risked coincidental meetings with acquaintances, coincidences that did indeed occur, but that still no one would know what they were doing: “Who would suspect we weren’t going anywhere?”  Also, the trip was illegal.  The autoroute is, as every driver on it knows, for speed, and staying on it for a month was against the rules.  Cortázar knew the rules, and sent a letter to “Monsieur le Directeur” of the Public Highways Authority to request permission for the expedition.  The letter (and its fate) is included in a chapter here titled, “Of how we wrote a letter, which, unusual though it might have been, deserved a reply, which it did not receive, and how in light of this, the members of the expedition decided to ignore such unspeakable behavior and bring to a successful conclusion what was described therein in the most gallant and detailed manner.”  The mock-seriousness pervades the expedition, among whose rules are that the explorers will “carry out scientific and topographical studies of each rest area, taking note of all pertinent observations”.  Any frivolity was expressly allowed: “By common agreement, and given that neither of us is a masochist, we decided moreover that we will be allowed to take advantage of all that we can find on the freeway: restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.”

Most nights are not spent in hotels, however, but in their red Volkswagen minibus with a roof that expands upward, a minibus christened Fafner, and referred to as “he” throughout the book, and also regarded throughout as a protective dragon.  Fafner never lets them down, but of course his duties as conveyance are minimal.  “Fafner, red dragon, devourer of kilometres over so many years and countries, is now a docile, immobile elephant who only moves for ten or twenty minutes a day to stay again placidly anchored on his four rubbery feet.  He doesn’t take it badly...”  The explorers are not on the road for long, the official log entries revealing that they might leave one rest area only to pull into the next mere minutes later.  In the rest areas they write, mostly, and plenty of the pictures here (yes, photographic documentation of the expedition) show Cortázar at his typewriter.  A caption beneath one such photo uses the names they are assigned for the trip:

“Lobo: How many photos are you going to take of me writing?”

“Osita: Lots.  We have to convince the reader of the seriousness of our scientific expedition.”

Writing was also from time to time a cover.  What they were doing was, after all, illegal, and they began to wonder if a road crew was spying on them, especially since its members repeatedly turned up on successive stops.  “To convince the enemy,” runs the caption on one photo of Cortázar typing, “Julio pretends to be writing at full speed, something which always inspires respect.”  The road crews say they are chipping away the curbs so that handicapped people can get to the rest-stop restrooms, but the members of the expedition are not satisfied with merely explaining the purpose of the expedition to them; they thereupon “sit down to type furiously, to show them that we’re writing a book about the autoroute in order that they won’t suspect what we’re really doing: writing a book about the autoroute.”  If it weren’t enough to be pursued by highway authorities, they are also followed by the querulous Calac and Polanco who repeatedly come upon the expedition from a past book, shoving their way into this one, and cadging drinks. 

The scientific observations have to do with slugs and insects, agreeable creatures that the explorers welcome, except for the ants.  Weather was generally good, but finding shade in which to put Fafner was often a trial.  Some of the rest stops were full of trees and beauty, but one is designated “sinister” and another “Hideous rest stop, especially after the last one.”  They are amazed by all the tourists who turn the more active stops into international cities.  They listen to the news about the Falklands war, and they make themselves comfortable in their hideous lawn chairs, the “Floral Horrors”.  They find evidence of witches; it turns out that the construction cones are their hats.  They make love while highway lights flash through Fafner’s windows “like doing it in a kaleidoscope.” 

It is fully silly and fully charming, and the book stands as a tribute to a wonderful relationship between the two intrepid explorers.  It represented, as Cortázar summarizes toward the end of the book, an “advance in happiness and love from which we emerged so fulfilled that nothing, afterwards, even admirable travels and hours of perfect harmony, could surpass that month outside of time, that interior month where we knew for the first and last time what absolute happiness was.”  And so it is sad to come to the postscript, which Cortázar had to finish alone, for Dunlop died at age 36 only a few months after the expedition; he was to follow her only a couple of years later (their illnesses are only lightly hinted at in the book).  This was to be his last book.  The reader finishes it with gratitude; these were two imaginative and funny people, and it is generous of them to have had us along for the ride.