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

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (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 Hamlet, 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.