I THE MYTH OF OXFORD It was in the year of 2004 that I went on a pilgrimage to Oxford. Following my third year of studies, I worked as a security officer in London, really. To escape night-shift drudgery and the money-mad branded high streets, I took flight on a bus to the city of dreaming spires. I don’t know exactly why, but the city has held my imagination since I was a young boy. Harry Potter hadn’t been written yet, so I felt quite alone in my longing for a place of learning amidst gothic towers. My Oxford was, if I recollect, a picture of sandwiches and tea, wooden oars and willowing water. A picture probably formed by the illustrations of Ratty and Mole ‘messing about in boats’ and stopping for tea and cakes on grassy green shores that were difficult to imagine on the dusty turf banks of brown rivers in the Highveld; a picture of dining halls with wooden thresholds eroded by centuries of feet; of the Inklings huddled around a crackling fire at the Eagle and Child with ale, talking literature and taking turns to read their manuscripts—minds searching for truth, unfettered by ‘high impact research initiatives’. It was then with great anticipation that the bus left Victoria Station at dusk, but with great disappointment that it passed, glistening there in the morning Oxfordshire sun: the fat American letters spelling out ‘McDonalds’. So it seemed that Oxford was a lie, a place—like the blue of mountains— that disappears when you reach it. It seems there is the real Oxford of congested streets and modern buildings—the place itself—and the moonlit lime-scented Oxford of Matthew Arnold, the place of myth.
II DEBUNKING THE MYTH I call it a myth because of the discrepancy between the observable, physical reality of the town and its representations. What are we to make of it?
A Barthesian interpretation
If we follow Roland Barthes and do a post-modern hermeneutic analysis of it, we might compile a collage of signs (verbal and visual) produced by an industry of Oxfordishness: Scenes of fops lazing on river banks with champagne glasses wearing straw hats; scatter-brained dons awkwardly moving from college quad to fireside pub. Those are the signs: tweed, tower, toga. Together they signify Oxford as a place of liberal learning steeped in ancient tradition inhabited by eccentric men of genius and dandies of wit. But then would come the (typically postmodern) moment when the secondary language is revealed: the myth of Oxford as a place in which chauvinistic elitism is legitimized by its romance. And so we could go on to demystify Oxford to guard ourselves against the hidden propaganda of the charade.
A symbolist interpretation
Or, we might follow a symbolist approach and try to search for the meaning of the myth by identifying archetypes also found in other myths: for example, we might say that the triad of Student-Don-College represents the archetypes of Eternal Boy (Puer Aeturnus)-Wise Old Man-Mother: the student is bawdy like Bacchus and creative like Apollo, the Don gives guidance like a Gandalf or Mr Miyagi, and the College is the fertile womb sustaining life. Or something like that.
A functionalist interpretation
Or, we might search for the functions of the myth: the myth of Oxford was created to uphold the English system of class. The graduation ceremony is a ritual that grants the participant access to Parliament. The image of the scatterbrained don was made to explain, in the absence of
Left: Apollon terroriste, Little Sparta (the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland), photo by Jonathan Jones,
scientific theories, the inexplicable occurrence of scholars forgetting where they left their car keys.
A Discovery Channel interpretation
Or, in the spirit of the popular definition of myth as a lie, we can bust myths about Oxford (as indeed one website does): it is not a place filled only with ‘posh’ people, lectures are not presented in Latin and there aren’t solely craggy pubs in the streets—Big Macs are peddled too. And so we can go on to seek the hidden message of the myth behind the images, look for the symbolic meanings of the myth, try to find out what it originally did (what did it explain?), or debunk it by discerning facts from fiction. And these, to be sure, will be worthwhile academic exercises. But there is one other way to look at the Myth of Oxford that may be more helpful for designers. You see, I didn’t finish my story of the pilgrimage there: after the disenchantment of finding McDonald’s and Boots (which is really like encountering, whilst reading The Lord of the Rings, a tourist advertisement for Air New Zealand), I soon found myself off the High-Street in lanes that maze through moss-grown walls that led me to Magdalene College—C.S. Lewis’s suite of rooms being one of the stations on my pilgrimage. From there I wandered into Addisson’s Walk and encountered, at the end of the garden path, a poem by Lewis: I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear: This year the summer will come true. This year. This year... This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell, We shall escape the circle and undo the spell. With the beacons of modernity out of mind, I was re-enchanted. There I felt the Myth of Oxford: a place with the vague outlines of a unified symbol wherein the bells toll eternity. The myth had no hidden agenda, nor an allegoric meaning that begged to be decoded, nor was I buying into a lie or conspiracy. I experienced it, dare I say, phenomenologically. The myth transubstantiated the stone, grass and trees. The myth had given form to the world experienced through my senses.
III MYTH AS WORLD-MAKING It is this world-making capacity of myth that can give form to the landscape beyond that which is assumed to exist independently from our perception, that I think holds value for landscape architecture. The child, who stands in his room at the window and imagines to be the captain of a spaceship staring at the starlit abyss, is participating in his world—he is helping to make it. When his father comes in and says, “you silly boy, it is just a window”, he breaks the spell and the window becomes a mere thing. The father, like John Locke in the eighteenth century, tries to strip away the contribution of the boy’s perception of the object and make him see it ‘for what it is’—that abstracted concept of a window that satisfies our lowest, common definition of it. If only the father knew that his technical, objective word ‘window’ was also once an attempt to imaginatively uplift a mere opening in a wall by means of a metaphor: Vindauga, Old Norse for ‘eyes of a building that let in the wind’. The father, as part of a community sharing language, thus too, without being aware of it, participates in making the world—he is just borrowing an image frozen in language, where the boy created it himself. A view of the world (as held by the father) that does not admit, or wish to admit, that we participate creatively in it, is one in which phenomena are seen to exist independently from
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