Tracing the Apparatus: The Technological Mediation of Experience in Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o un viaje atemporal París-Marsella By Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop

Abstract

In 1982, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop commenced a thirty-three-day journey from Paris to Marseille in which they promised to never leave the autoroute and to stop at every single rest stop. The journey, four years in the making, was designed as a game that would allow the two to side-step, or interrupt, their regular lives. Los autonautas de la cosmopista, a book made up of the compilation of a typewritten travel log, photographs, a narrative account of the experience, fictional letters, newspaper clippings, and hand-drawn maps, was published in 1983 as a means of documenting this experience. The collection and presentation of these various archival materials and repeated references to technology – the road, van, typewriter, and camera in particular – make visible the materiality of textual production and the intertwined work of the human body and the apparatus. As such, this article examines the photographs within the book and argues that the apparatuses and their photographic representations create a poetics of collaborative creation and playful interruptions, thus revealing an explicit relationship between technology and memory for Cortázar and Dunlop.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Cortázar
• technology
• travel writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The book was translated into English in 2007 by Anne McLean and published as Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. All English translations come from this edition, though page numbers refer to the Spanish edition.

2 Of note, certain elements differ in the French text (letters typed with italics in the Spanish text appear in the French as handwritten letters and more photographs appear in the French), further suggesting the fluid nature of the text.

3 Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.

4 In her reading, Lindsay argues that it is precisely this subversion that is at stake in the text and that the book is less about the game or the journey itself and more about that which lies on the periphery, which, for her, relates to international politics (2009, 214).

5 Flusser explains the term as such: “This is a new kind of function in which human beings are neither the constant nor the variable but in which human beings and apparatus merge into a unity. It is therefore appropriate to call photographers functionaries” (2000, 27).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Kathleen Booker

Sarah Booker is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Literature at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American narrative and translation studies and her work has been published in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and Hispanic Studies Review. She is also a literary translator and has translated the work of Cristina Rivera Garza and Mónica Ojeda, among others. Her translations of Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest and Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country were published with Feminist Press (2017, 2020) and her translation of Ojeda’s Jawbone is forthcoming with Coffee House Press (2021).