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. On the one hand, it is crucial to the thematic order of the novel itself, poignantly articulating a dichotomy of restriction and transgression that also manifests itself in a range of less obvious forms. On the other hand, it enrolls Sterne's book in a broader trend within the history of the novel which uses the passport to highlight a clash, defining of modernity, between the movement control of governments and the mobility of individuals. If the former leads to a better understanding of the metaphoric order that informs the plot of A Sentimental Journey, the latter enables a new form of historical contextualization of this novel based on the history of borders and passports.¹

In assessing this centrality of the passport episode, it is necessary first to consider the enunciatory status of the passport as a literary motif, particularly the fact that it appears to encompass metaphorical as well as literal/historical meanings. Stephen Greenblatt's influential manifesto for cultural mobility studies offers a handle on this problem. According to Greenblatt, the field of cultural studies was traditionally predicated on assumptions of settledness and rootedness. In order to counter this entrenched assumption of stability with an enhanced awareness of cultural mobility, Greenblatt insists that this mobility be treated non-metaphorically:

The physical, infrastructural, and institutional conditions of movement—the available routes; the maps; the vehicles; the relative speed; the controls and costs; the limits on what can be transported; the authorizations required; the inns, relay stations and transfer points; the travel facilitators—are all serious objects of analysis. Only when conditions directly related to literal movement are firmly grasped will it be possible fully to understand the metaphorical movements: between center and periphery; faith and scepticism; order and chaos; exteriority and interiority.

(2009, 250)

Restricting oneself to mobility in the literal sense is no doubt sound advice, especially if one if interested, as Greenblatt is, in delineating a potentially vast new area of research. However, in the specific context of the interfacing between fictional literature and the passport system it is not always easy to separate out literal and metaphorical meanings. Any extended use of the passport motif in a literary text automatically renders this motif functional, for example in the sense of defining a fictional space, instigating a certain type of plot, or articulating key thematic ideas,² and such functionalization already takes us a step beyond literal mobility. Moreover, passports are always semantically overinvested and linked, as a concrete historical anchor, to higher-order questions of state security, individual freedom, mobility, and personal and national identity. At the highest level of generality, the passport signifies communication across borders, not just in the form...