When relatives ask me, with polite puzzlement, about the point of my Oxford English degree, I often recall a scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s towards the end, when everyone’s gathered in court because a knight has stolen some tarts. Then, all at once, evidence arrives in the form of a letter — and nobody knows what to make of it. Alice sees nothing in it; the jury echoes her confusion; but the King of Hearts insists, after a bespectacled pause, “I seem to see some meaning after all.” After three years at Oxford, I side firmly with the King: the point of literature may not be obvious, but it’s certainly there.
How to begin? Perhaps with a paradox: that English at Oxford did not teach me anything. Unlike my friends in maths or science, I never walked into a lecture to type up set notes about a set topic within a set curriculum. Instead, lectures untaught me. For instance, early on in first year, I was pretty sure I knew what a metaphor was: a literary technique where we use a word or phrase to describe something that isn’t literally true. The sun smiling, but without a face; the grass dancing, but without limbs. Then I walked into that lecture and a metaphor was no longer something I hunted and highlighted in a GCSE poem, but a way of thinking and thus expressing ourselves. Like how we implicitly assume ‘high’ to be good and ‘low’ to be bad, hence words like ‘high-spirited’ or ‘depressed’. By unteaching me what constitutes a metaphor, I was freed from the limits of my own definition.
Another vital definition my degree reshaped was that of ‘critical thinking’. I had happily assumed critical thinking meant disagreeing, and so I disagreed with everything: the question and the questioner, the critic and the criticism. Now, there is a rather glaring flaw with this, which is that it only ever reinforced what I already thought. This was not critical thinking — it was critical filtration. Instead, I slowly came to learn, true critical thinking was expansive. Like facing a nervous date, I had to sit with an idea without rejecting it right away to give it a chance to change my mind. And, more often than actual dates, it did.
But this was only possible due to the way my life at Oxford was structured. I had the freedom and feedback to feed my curiosity in order to grow most deeply. To illustrate what I mean, let me show you a realistic week in my term-life: Monday: I am given a prompt in class or by email – we are studying satire in the 18th century – with a few starting points like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Tuesday: I watch Jack Black’s 2010 version of Gulliver’s Travels and decide that is the text for me. Wednesday: I actually read Gulliver’s Travels. Thursday: I continue reading, and make note of things that I find odd, like the talking horses who casually debate genocide. Friday: I finish reading, look at my list of odd finds and note down underlying connections. I realise a persistent theme is Gulliver himself: who is he? Is he Swift’s stand-in? Why is he so dense sometimes? Saturday: I begin reading around the bigger question of the role of unreliable narrators in satire. Sunday: I write this up into an essay about how having an unreliable narrator disrupts the way we read satire, especially as satire usually works by analogy. Monday: I have a 30-45 minute tutorial with my tutor, who pushes my thinking further — can satire be founded upon anything other than analogy? Why does Swift publish the book initially under Gulliver’s name?
By the end of that week, I have grown into someone who has considered deeply the nature of satire and, by extension, the nature of analogy. And this has only been possible because I have had the freedom and time to read whatever I want, and the feedback to push my thinking further. This, then, is the real value of an institution like Oxford: it gave me time to think slower, space to think deeper, and precious personalised feedback to think harder.
All of which returns me neatly to the King of Hearts. Studying literature is rather like studying that nonsensical letter. Many will dismiss it after a single glance; many more won’t bother to glance at all. But the King of Hearts pauses, adjusts his spectacles, and dares to find meaning precisely because it is not obvious. My whole three years I have spent practising the art and act of relentless curiosity: learning to pause whether others barely glance, to peer deeper where others see nothing, and to patiently seek significance where others move on. Like Wonderland, literature rarely hands us straightforward truths. Rather, it invites us, again and again, to insist: I seem to see some meaning after all.
Chenrui Zhang is a recent Balliol graduate and disciple of Seamus Perry, Adam Smyth, Eleanor Baker, Hannah Ryley and co.
