Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. Anne McLean, translator. Archipelago Books, 1983/2007.

Cortázar and Dunlop were husband and wife; they married in 1981. They cowrote this book about the four week expedition they took in their Volkswagen campervan along the highway from Paris to Marseille. Cortázar was one of the Latin American Boom authors and his radical experiments with narrative form–most notably Hopscotch–made him the modernists’ modernist or the modernists’ postmodernist or the postmodernists’ modernist. Reading Cortázar is always challenging, surprising, and illuminating. Autonauts of the Cosmoroute is a different kettle of fish. It is a travel narrative, inventive in form and content, organized chronologically with daily logs, short essays, quotations, Cervantine section summaries, letters, drawings and photos. With the exception of the last few pages, all the other writing that Cortázar and Dunlop did for the book was done on the trip: writing about the adventure was done on the adventure and became an integral part of the adventure as well. Initially, the word that came to mind when I thought about how to characterize Autonauts of the Cosmoroute is not one that I have applied to Cortázar before: cute. But I was wrong, because I was being dismissive. Rather, it is the story of a happy couple–a happy couple of writers–who are having a road adventure and enjoying, almost, all of it. Told in a mock heroic style, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute has its tensions and conflicts–a story has to have tension and conflict, after all–but they are overwhelmed by the joy and contentment that Cortázar and Dunlop find in one another as they slowly drive south from Paris. The journey is as much internal and interpersonal as it is physical and geographical. In terms of road narratives,  Autonauts of the Cosmoroute seems the opposite of On the Road, where Kerouac, Casady, and company drive fast, roaring hell bent for wherever, looking for experiences, truth, and thrills outside the banal bounds of post WWII bourgeois life. Cortázar and Dunlop drive slowly along a planned and deliberate route searching for spaces outside the normal flow of everyday life to discover what? Truth? Self? Contentment? Each other? If at the beginning of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, I thought it a cute domestic fable, by the end I have a very different opinion and am as impressed by the creativity and innovations as I was when I read Hopscotch.  

The Plan: Cortázar and Dunlop begin planning this trip in 1978, but with delays, health issues, mechanical problems, scheduling difficulties, and other responsibilities–which are collectively identified as “demons” in the book–it is not until spring of 1982 that they are able to clear four weeks for the adventure, which began on Sunday, May 23rd and lasted until Sunday, June 23rd. The trip between Paris and Marseille is about 800 kilometers, which driving the freeway between the two city at 100 km/h should take eight hours.  Cortázar and Dunlop want to stop at all the rest areas along the way, stopping at the second one each day and overnighting there. Given the number of rest areas on the highway, it took a month to make it to Marseille. The red VW camper van they drive is named Fafner, after the dragon in The Ring of the Niebelungen, and it is pretty well self-contained with a refrigerator, gas burner, sink, water tank, fold out seat/mattress, and pop-up roof. They mostly live out of the van, but at rest areas with restaurants they will eat at the restaurant, and at rest areas with a hotel they will spend the night in the hotel. They do not exit the highway to enter villages and towns along the route; the rest areas are extensions of the highway but not exits. Because of the limited space in the van, they arrange for friends from Paris and Marseille to meet them at particular rest areas with supplies. They pick up other supplies at the gas stations, restaurants, and hotels in the larger rest areas. These are the basic rules of the trip, and they vary from them only occasionally when a rest area is closed or a problem in some way. At each rest area, they act as scientists/explorers, noting temperature and weather, describing what is in each rest area (WC, tables, trees, shade, fencing) and its proximity to the highway and other geological features (hills, forests, etc.). They also keep track of what and where they eat (at the van, in a restaurant) and where they sleep (van, hotel) as well as noteworthy events (resupply missions, noisy trucks, number of German, Belgian and English tourists).

Written out this way, it all sounds a bit flat and prosaic, but it isn’t. Cortázar and Dunlop have the imaginations to make these sidebars of highway travel really quite interesting. They refer to each other as El Lobo(wolf) and La Osita (little bear), and with the campervan named Fafner the dragon, the stories they tell begin to sound like animal fables, after which the book no longer inhabits the realm of plain realism.  Cortázar and Dunlop are also loners; they are not anti-social but simply prefer the solitude of each other’s company. Except for the friends who come to bring them supplies, they generally don’t interact much with the people they find at the rest areas. Fortunately, most of them are wooded, so Cortázar and Dunlop can find a way to sequester themselves. Why? Well, besides being really into one another, off and away they can set up their typewriters and write without interruption. Cortázar and Dunlop embark upon this adventure not simply to experience it but to write about it, so writing time and location has to be figured into their daily routine. If there is a primary discovery that comes out of their observing and writing, it is that, on the margin of the highway on which they are traveling bit by bit, a parallel culture distinct from and richer than the utilitarian, streamlined purpose of the highway exists. To misuse Gertude Stein’s judgment of her hometown, Oakland, CA, there is more there there on the margins than on the highway which people, cars, and trucks are passing over. But what is also important to understand is that the Cortázar and Dunlop are inspired by the environments which surround them, and the more time they spend in them over the course of a month the more they understand and know them, thus the more they are inspired to write.

Every day in the book begins with about a page-long log of that day’s activities and pertinent information (name and basic characterization of rest area; what they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; weather; where Fafner is parked and in which direction; notable geographic features, occurrences, people, cars, trucks). After the log, there are photos and/or drawings, and there are one or a few textual pieces (short essays, fiction, poetry, quotations from others) that are by Cortázar or Dunlop or both (sometimes it is difficult to tell). The essays seem to be on just about anything. A very short list: tribute to one of Cortázar’s translators, Paul Blackburn; a paean to a personified Fafner; their concerns about construction crews, gendarmes, and other potential demons at the rest areas; Cortázar’s observations about how Carol sleeps; sex and intimacy at the rest areas, particularly among truckers; Cortázar puzzling over the collection of music cassettes (post WWII classical, jazz, tango) he brought; Cortázar claim that travel touches the inner child as he remembers reading Eugene Sue’s novel The Mysteries of the People, which included the battle, fought near the rest area, between Julius Caesar's forces and the Gaul Vercingetorix. Within the slow progress toward Marseille, it is fascinating to see the two’s creative productivity. 

Cortázar uses fiction to create a counterpoint for their daily experiences and activities. He deploys two of his fictional characters, Calex and Polanco, who seem to be following them on the road.  They comment disparagingly on Cortázar and Dunlop’s progress and seem to be waiting to be invited to become fuller members of the adventure; Cortázar offers no such invitation, and the two characters stalk off insulted.  More interesting, and from the early part of the trip, is a series of letters from a woman to her son, who is in Canada. She and her husband are retired and are on the road; he is an alcoholic who criticizes and dismisses her concerns about him and everything else. Besides complaining about her husband, She tells the–shocking–story of the maiden aunt who dies but who turns out was not a maiden aunt after all and had a huge family that the sad, bourgie woman knew nothing about. The discovery shakes the bourgie woman to the core. She is deeply unhappy. In her deep-seeded alienation, the woman encounters Cortázar, Dunlop, and Fafner at a number of rest areas and comes obsessed with them. She finds them strange, initially likes them but then becomes suspicious of them. She wanders around one of the rest areas and once again finds Fafner. This time, though, she pokes around so closely that she–shockingly–finds Cortázar and Dunlop having sex in the Faf, and later at another rest stop she makes off with their VISA to prove that they are real and that she is not crazy. She is unhappy and has no control in her life, while in contrast Cortázar and Dunlop seem quite content simple to just be and live in mobile domestic bliss. The emptiness of middle class restrictions illuminates the joy of  Cortázar and Dunlop eccentric and liberating choices. 

The slow progress of their adventure ultimately produces a sense of timelessness, as if they have been warped out of time and live in an infinite middle between end points, Paris and Marseille, one time and a later time. Ironically, they find timelessness next to a highway, which is so heavy with time. ←This may or may not be the liberation they were seeking, but it is the liberation they found, however temporarily. When they finally make it to Marseille they feel bad, because they had liked the journey so much. It produced a book and so much more. They return to their lives in Paris and the world as activists, spending time in Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. Cortázar was much like Salman Rushdie at the time, who wrote The Jaguar Smiles in support of the Sandinistas. But Carol got sick (leukemia? AIDS? bone marrow failure?), worsens and dies. Julio writes the last chapter of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, tells the story of her death and how he carries on with editing the book. The last image of the book, one of Cortázar’s drawings, is also on the cover, a Volkswagen camper van with wings. When I first looked at the cover, I thought that it was just a funny, spacey reflection of the title, but when I looked at it again at the end I realized that it, and the entire book, is a memento mori. Extraordinarily powerful, made even more powerful because a year after Autonauts of the Cosmoroute was published Julio Cortázar died. As happy as this book is, it is also irretrievably sad.