Porous borders: the passport as an access metaphor in Laurence Sterne's 'A Sentimental Journey'

Laurence Sterne’s <i>A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy</i> (1768) includes among its scenes and vignettes a suite of chapters devoted to what would later, in the wake of the French Revolution, become a standard motif of British travel writing: the passport, seen both as an instrument of control and as a means of gaining access to otherwise restricted territories. When reconstructed without the jumbled chronology that characterizes Sterne’s fiction, this episode relates how the whimsical narrator, Yorick, forgot to procure a valid travel document for himself prior to his precipitous departure for France, and how he eventually makes up for this neglect with the help of a well-connected count at Versailles. In purely narrative terms, it plays only a minor role in a book that, as indicated by the title, is more concerned with the emotional than the epic aspects of travel. Arguably, Yorick’s passport predicament serves simply as a pretext for introducing another suite of sentimental scenes, beginning with that of the encaged starling, evocative of the confined existence of a prisoner, and concluding with the narrator’s successful attempt to identify himself to the count by gesturing towards the gravedigger scene in <i>Hamlet</i>, which features the skull of his namesake, the late court jester. Yet, as I argue in this essay, the significance of the passport episode goes far beyond this narrative function.