ABSTRACT
In May 1982, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop embarked on an expedition down the autoroute between Paris and Marseille in a Volkswagen camper van, a trip which might ordinarily take some ten hours by car. The two self-styled adventurers set strict parameters for their journey, however: they were to stop at every designated parking area en route, at the rate of two per day, lunching at the first, and spending the night in the second. Since there were some sixty-five stopping places on that southbound road, their planned itinerary would take them just over one month. The journey was then set down in a travel book that was published simultaneously in Spanish and French editions as Los autonautas de la cosmopista/ Les autonautes de la cosmopiste, a title which translates into English as The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.2 In their rigidly-controlled road trip, the couple traverse the uncharted interstices of the highway and landscape, a space which has also been conceptualised by anthropologist Marc Augé as a “non-place”.3 In doing so, the Argentine-Canadian pair might well be seen as waggish expedition leaders or, as Jaime Alazraki puts it, as “cosmonauts, only on a motorway and in a car”.4 The composition of the travelogue supports this reading of their endeavour: the book mimics the style of ‘early’ explorers’ chronicles (among others, those of Marco Polo and Jean Charcot), and is a mélange of travel narrative and daily journal entries, recording local ambient temperatures, geographical directions, and even menus du jour. Furthermore, the book is illustrated by photographs and maps drawn by Dunlop’s son, Stéphane Hebert, and is interpolated at intervals with pieces of short fiction. These include a one-way epistolary interlude called “Mother’s Letters”, from a mother travelling with her husband in France to her son on military service in Canada, and a short story about an impromptu motel stop by a pair of travellers who bear some resemblance to the couple on the road trip on which the rest of the book is predicated.
