La plume et la route: Charles Dickens, écrivain-voyageur by Nathalie Vanfasse (review)

Nathalie Vanfasse's superbly written tribute to Charles Dickens's travel writing, La plume et la route, which translates as The Pen and the Road, is a careful reconsideration and repositioning of American Notes, Pictures from Italy, The Uncommerical Traveller and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices that puts these hitherto peripheral works at the center of Dickensian writing. Her title and subtitle already give us a sense of what she has set out to do: rescue the four works from the margins of Dickens's production and reinstate them as central to his thought, style and technique. Vanfasse shows us that his perambulations on foot, by train or ship (in London, around Britain, within Italy, or crossing and re-crossing the Channel to get to Condette or the Atlantic to get to America) are what generated his oeuvre; his words were produced thanks to movement and passage, his sentences the fruit of digression and transgression. We find a subtle understanding of movement in space as the subject of, or rather the metaphor and poetic paradigm behind his restless writing which constantly decenters itself and inhabits the margins of town, city, page and human mind.

The first part entitled "Concordances des temps et poétique du déplacement" ("Tense and time sequencing and the poetics of displacement") plays on the ambiguity of the French word "temps," which means both "time" and the "tense of verbs," and that of "déplacement," which means both movement and displacement. Here we are given the tools to understand that all of Dickens's geographical journeys are also journeys in time, to the past or to the future, and that his writing therefore displaces or misplaces the reader in terms of aesthetic and even ideological expectations.

The second part "Figures du voyageur, perception de l'espace et traversée des genres" ("Figures of the traveler, the perception of space and the journey across genres") seeks to give a sense of the myriad styles and genre which lie beneath the blanket term of "travel writing." From the terms "reportage" and "literature" we move to "humor," "romance" and the style of the flâneur. Nothing stands still in the Dickens world, neither the writer nor the pen that shifts restlessly from place to place, genre to genre.

The third part makes perhaps the most rewarding reading of all since it is here that Vanfasse gives us "Parcours multimédias" or "Multimedia trajectories;" she not only considers each medium used by Dickens at different moments in the four works (the note, the letter, the engraving, the diary, the diorama to name but a few) but delivers to us the surprising and rhizomic meanderings of media interaction: the note with the banknote, the panorama with narrative and text with illustration. In the first chapter in this section, Vanfasse takes the words "Les billets d'Amérique" or "American Notes" and unfolds their full meaning and possibility. We find the idea of the counterfeit and the notion of copyright, as well as Dickens's own creation of a coinage or money through the circulation of his own works, which might become a single currency. His written "notes" circulate, are copied and sometimes lose and gain value as they become victims of piracy or hacking. Some intriguing and beautiful photographs of the bank notes Dickens would have seen and handled are included at the end of the book–small rectangles of text and image, passing from hand to hand much as Dickens's own monthly numbers or magazines did. We also find images of panoramas and dioramas, pre-cinematic experiences which find their way into Pictures from Italy and other writings.

To examine just a few of the many remarkable moments from La plume et la route, we might consider chapter 3 "American Notes: between reportage and literature," which appears in part 2 ("The Journey through Genres") in which Vanfasse shows all the subtlety of her close reading...