A few weeks before the expedition chronicled in
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Julio Cortazar wrote to the director of the Public Highways Authority in Paris requesting authorization for a "slightly madcap and quite surreal 'expedition,' which would consist of traveling from Paris to Marseille on the autoroute aboard our Volkswagen Combi Van equipped with everything necessary, stopping at each of the sixty-five rest areas at the rate of two per day; in other words, taking more than a month to complete the Paris-Marseille journey without ever leaving the freeway." He wrote because, as he understood, "a vehicle is not allowed to stay on the autoroute for more than two days at a time."
It's not surprising that he never received a reply. What is surprising is that Cortazar was writing to the representative of an organization that had previously requested authorization to publish passages from his story, "The Southern Autoroute," in one of their magazines, which he graciously granted. This raises two important questions (at least):
(1) What motivated the Authority to use excerpts from Cortazar's story, which imagines a horrendous traffic jam (
bouchon) on the highway from Marseilles to Paris, and the impromptu community that emerges over the several days and nights the travelers are trapped there. It's August, and all of Paris is returning from holidays. There is solidarity, charity, suicide, rumors, and romance. And when it's all over (spoiler alert!), and traffic starts to move again, the engineer-protagonist in his Peugeot 404, wonders:
"Why all this hurry, why this mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead."
(2) What were these magazines published by the French Public Highways Authority? And how can I get hold of them?
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