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Motorway Madness

As with many of the books I’ve come to love most, I bought Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) impulsively, knowing nothing about it, and mainly because of its cover. This features a doughty old red Volkswagen camper, with its forward-pitched roof raised like a sceptical eyebrow as a bearded man climbs out through its sliding side door. In the foreground, we see two lurid, flowery chairs. Above is only blue sky. Inside, you can make out a cooker, a folding table and a checked curtain. It is the kind of van in which you could go a long way.

The book’s authors, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, do indeed go a long way, metaphorically speaking. In literal terms, they do not go far at all. Their book recounts a journey they made in the early summer of 1982 from Paris to Marseilles, on the high-speed autoroute. Normally this would be a boring, featureless trip, similar to that made by thousands of other people, and taking some ten hours in a VW van. Its tedium would be relieved by music on the radio and brief stops at the route’s service stations or the leafy picnic spots that are such a feature of French motorways. Mostly, it would just be long, fast driving. No one would want to spend time on a motorway for fun – or would they?

Cortázar and Dunlop decided that they would, so they did the journey not in ten hours but in a month. They entered the Paris end of the autoroute on Sunday, 23 May, and 32 days later, on Wednesday, 23 June, they left at the ‘Welcome to Marseilles’ sign. In between, they stopped at every one of the route’s 65 motels, cafeterias, lay-bys and picnic areas. They followed two simple rules: they would not leave the motorway until the end, and they would stop twice each day, once for lunch and once overnight, no more and no less.

It was a mad caper ‒ a Dada performance and a quixotic adventure, but the spirit of whimsy belied the sombre origins of their trip. Julio Cortáza

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As with many of the books I’ve come to love most, I bought Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) impulsively, knowing nothing about it, and mainly because of its cover. This features a doughty old red Volkswagen camper, with its forward-pitched roof raised like a sceptical eyebrow as a bearded man climbs out through its sliding side door. In the foreground, we see two lurid, flowery chairs. Above is only blue sky. Inside, you can make out a cooker, a folding table and a checked curtain. It is the kind of van in which you could go a long way.

The book’s authors, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, do indeed go a long way, metaphorically speaking. In literal terms, they do not go far at all. Their book recounts a journey they made in the early summer of 1982 from Paris to Marseilles, on the high-speed autoroute. Normally this would be a boring, featureless trip, similar to that made by thousands of other people, and taking some ten hours in a VW van. Its tedium would be relieved by music on the radio and brief stops at the route’s service stations or the leafy picnic spots that are such a feature of French motorways. Mostly, it would just be long, fast driving. No one would want to spend time on a motorway for fun – or would they? Cortázar and Dunlop decided that they would, so they did the journey not in ten hours but in a month. They entered the Paris end of the autoroute on Sunday, 23 May, and 32 days later, on Wednesday, 23 June, they left at the ‘Welcome to Marseilles’ sign. In between, they stopped at every one of the route’s 65 motels, cafeterias, lay-bys and picnic areas. They followed two simple rules: they would not leave the motorway until the end, and they would stop twice each day, once for lunch and once overnight, no more and no less. It was a mad caper ‒ a Dada performance and a quixotic adventure, but the spirit of whimsy belied the sombre origins of their trip. Julio Cortázar was a famous Argentine short-story writer and novelist, and his wife Carol Dunlop was a Canadian photographer and translator; both had just come through bouts of serious illness, for which they had endured debilitating treatments. They emerged weakened and apprehensive of the future, aware of the proximity of death. The autoroute trip was their way of celebrating life and love, stepping outside ordinary time and certainly outside any ordinary idea of what a holiday was. They spent the month almost exclusively with each other – and with their van, which acquired its own gently buffoonish personality, and which they named Fafner after Wagner’s dragon, because of its flaring crest and the French ‘F’ label on its rear. They adhered devoutly to the rules they had devised, for without such rules the journey would be ‘nothing more than stupidity’. Even when they saw tempting gaps, they did not climb through the motorway perimeter fence. Nor did they skip even the humblest rest stop. The road was not a major feature: often they were only on it for a few minutes a day. In the more peaceful rest stops, it would recede to a distant swishing of traffic, like the sound of the sea. If they found themselves parked next to a motel they would stay in it, but otherwise they slept in Fafner, raising his roof and setting up their folding table and flowery chairs – dubbed the ‘Florid Horrors’. They each had their own typewriter, and would work outside, attracting stares from more transient picnickers. Gendarmes sometimes stopped to question them, but seemed satisfied on hearing that they were writers. (Ah, France!) Friends occasionally drove down the highway to join them for a meal, bringing fresh fruit and vegetables, but mostly Cortázar and Dunlop were alone. And they played. They made up stories about other travellers they saw. They made love in Fafner’s bed. They took photos in the greenery, posing with the peculiar objects that motorway shops sell – plaster hands, garden gnomes, stuffed animals. As we read their account, we are drawn into their private oddball world, with its mythology, pet names and in jokes. We are allowed to join in, like Fafner, their substitute pet or child. Cortázar and Dunlop become children again too, leaping out of the van at each new stop to explore their immediate environment – something, as they point out, that kids and dogs in other vehicles always do, and adults never do. Reading this remark took me immediately back to my own childhood. I spent several of my own early years with my parents in a Volkswagen van very much like Fafner, except that ours was cream rather than red. We travelled in it from England to Australia, through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India; and then we drove round the top end of Australia. There were long interludes, first camped on a beach in Goa and then in a garden in Darwin, but mostly it was one long journey, with the van as our only home. I was 5 when we left and 7 when we arrived. We had taken two years to do a journey that now takes about 20 hours by plane. It seemed natural to me: I thought everyone lived that way. At almost every overnight stop (if there were not too many curious onlookers), I would do exactly as Cortázar and Dunlop did: I’d leap out and go for ‘an explore’, as I called it. Without looking for anything in particular, I’d run my little rounds and find animals, rocks, little streams, imaginary buried treasure – anything that was interesting and on my scale of observation. Unlike Cortázar and Dunlop, my family covered a lot of distance, all the way from one side of the planet to the other. It sounds like the opposite sort of journey to theirs. Yet, reading this book, I recognized their experience immediately. For a child of 5 to 7, and also for two adults who have just been terrified by a close encounter with mortality, what matters becomes constricted and intensified: it is found in whatever is instant and present. The marvels are not just found in famous tourist spots (though the Taj Mahal or Uluru are marvellous even to a child, mainly because they are beautiful in close-up). Extraordinary things turn up wherever one happens to be: each camping ground is a zone of minor local wonders, renewed each day as you move on. I was never sure where I was in the wider world, but I knew that a lizard or a shard of purple quartz was a wonderful thing. We lose the trick of this in later life, and only a particular kind of game can revive it. Alas, as Cortázar and Dunlop realized from the start, their game’s rules also made its end inevitable. By moving on exactly two stops a day for a month, they were brought to the end of the motorway and had to leave. After the journey, they moved to Nicaragua, where they became involved in politics, and worked up their diary notes and images for publication. Carol Dunlop’s 14-year-old son by a previous marriage, Stéphane Hébert, drew maps of each day’s route based on their pictures. They annotated their photographs: here is Julio typing, or Carol looking pensive. Here is Fafner in the dappled light, ‘adorned with shadows’ under trees; here he is looking ‘solemn, almost monumental’ at a roadside spot. They had hardly begun work when Dunlop’s illness returned, and she died towards the end of that same year. She was 36. Cortázar completed the book with their two-voiced diary entries, adding a final part about Carol’s death. On publication, he donated all rights and royalties for the book to his political cause in Nicaragua. The following year, he too fell ill. He died on 12 February 1984, of what was probably leukaemia, though some have claimed that it was AIDS acquired from a blood transfusion. Cortázar and Dunlop seem to have known all along that it would end this way. Autonauts on the Cosmoroute is a book written in defiance of death, and in celebration of life – as well as of exploration and companionship. What starts as a piece of fun becomes a profound meditation on time and space. Other drivers on the motorway zoom past them, wishing that time would pass faster, but Cortázar and Dunlop deliberately stretch time as far as it will go.  They know the value of it. Their journey makes them cosmonauts on the autoroute, interstellar voyagers who float weightlessly, half in the world and half out of it, with their sense of time enlarged so that – like cosmonauts ‒ they come home to find everyone else has aged while they have been temporarily untouched. They show us eternity in a dragon’s crest and heaven in a Florid Horror, and in doing so, they give us one of the most adventurous and wide-ranging travel books ever written.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Sarah Bakewell 2016


About the contributor

Sarah Bakewell’s last book was How to Live: A Life of Montaigne; her next one, this year, will be At the Existentialist Café. She still buys anything with a Volkswagen on the cover.

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