Oh, Oxford! Oh, beating heart of knowledge! Oh, trembling epicentre of debate! Your archaic colleges, witnesses to so many years of intellectual conquests; your libraries, famed for their extraordinary collections; your English Faculty on St Cross road, and the handwriting on the walls of the female toilet cubicles!
Who would have thought that so much could be learnt outside of the lecture theatres, the reading lists and the tutorials? That these stirrings of the truths of life are forevermore embedded into the university’s sanitary facilities?
This is not criminal graffiti. Oh no. This is the detailed etchings of students who are feverish to liberate their wisdom from the captivity of their minds, to impart it to other seekers of knowledge. These noble writers and their fair readers share the need for discussion, new concepts, confrontations, and the toilet.
What joy can be found in time-constrained wisdom, with its potential forced out in the time it takes to ‘do one’s business’. Strange looks from those waiting outside may occur when caught emerging from a cubicle either chuckling, contemplating, or after having spent an unexpectedly long time inside.
Yet these stares do nothing to deter the Truth-Seeker from dwelling between those white walls so as to revel in their quotes, comments and fantastic pretentiousness. And The World agrees: this year American author Doug Rice published From the Stall, a chronicle of some of the most insightful pieces of writing on the walls of the bathrooms in some of Michegan’s universities. Also this year, an exhibition at New York’s Nicholas Robinson Gallery featured a painting of bathroom wall graffiti by Munich-based artist Florian Süssmayr.
Of course, neither example quite reaches the levels attained by the Oxford University English student. One artist in Cubicle III proclaims, in a rather virulent pink highlighter, her sense of exclusion and injustice in being ‘a lonely queer, who did not study Latin, went to a crap school and is a dwarf’.
Yet she is still in a place of which many others can only dream. The English Faculty toilets. There are around 600 female English students – a meagre five percent of the total undergraduate population. The walls can be hidden no longer. The time has now come to flick back their locks, embrace men and non-English students alike, and expose the wonders therein…
A journey through the cubicles begins with someone’s suitable introduction of ‘an Oxford University Bathroom Stall… witticisms, pop culture references, self portraits’, and a drawing of girl wearing a badge which reads ‘freedom for toilet wall ART’. The great detail and size suggests that this particular student was in the cubicle for rather a long time, even by English Student Standards, but she puts the point across well.
Literary quotes abound, of course, with Cubicle II providing the perfect space for boasting about one’s capacity to memorise and recite. A quote from King Solomon’s Mines, a favourite among first-years, is used by a recluse to assert ‘I’m still alive, I’m still alive’, and an elegant hand has written ‘She seemed at once the penance lady elf, the demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self’. Any guesses as to the poet? (Answer: Keats).
The same cubicle also showcases everyone’s favourite: Jane Eyre. The famous line of ‘Reader I married him’ receives the response that, unfortunately, ‘He ruined me’ and the comment ‘well, that’s what you get for saying ‘yes, sir’ when he asked. Look it up’. Ah, Jane Eyre banter. It’s underrated.
As well as knowledge of literature, some students also go out of their way to demonstrate the key work skills that are also needed to be a Good English Student and write a first-class essay. A cheeky girl altered Dryden’s ‘A milk white hind, immortal and unchang’d’ by adding a ‘be’ prefix to the ‘hind’ (get it, get it?), and the eloquent conclusion of ‘doth grace this plastic seat of porcelain curved’. What a clear and practical demonstration of the usefulness in adapting every quote to the purpose intended, toilet humour included.
Literary devices, also, are advertised – most enthusiastically in the declaration by one student that ‘ALLITERATION IS BETTER THAN SEX! It’s perhaps not a unanimous decision, but it is a touching portrayal of enthusiasm for one’s subject. Another work skill, referencing, was instilled by one student who drew an arrow to a quote of poetry to label it as an extract from Wordsworth’s The Prelude. ‘Acknowledge your quotes, woman’, she demands. Indeed.
Cubicle IV will teach you a brief definition of ‘Tragedy’ and remind you of the importance of rigorous grammar, spelling and punctuation checks. ‘If you’ve got a full-stop, you need a verb’ a student advises. One poor victim made the mistake of making a mistake on the sacred wall. Sin of sins, she failed to recognise a pun. ‘Must be a first-year’, a more erudite superior writes, as everyone else nods in condoling agreement.
Is this nitpicking, as an angry red marker-pen accuses in fierce capitals? No no, it is necessary instruction, after all – everyone’s a winner in the spell-check game. What would Milton say? Will lectures ever stop being terrifying? What is your favourite novel? Cubicle III will ask these of you, and invite you to consider seriously your answers. ‘Milton, Shelley and Blake shall smash the bourgeois state!’ is another prominent comment, particularly with the response underneath it from another writer that ‘you ARE the bourgeois state!’
These questions, these invitations to Thought, these constructive criticisms. Fortunately, those in charge of the English Faculty’s amnesties have recognised the need to preserve these wall etchings, obviously understanding their importance in the reputation of ‘English at Oxford’.
One student questioned whether ‘this will still be here when I come back’, and although it did indeed avoid any caretaker’s assault, it was promptly scribbled out by blue biro for being ‘pointless’. Such empty words should not occupy such precious space.
The writing on the wall has come a long way since its first invention in Ancient Rome. The first examples of ‘graffiti’ survive on the walls of Pompeii, preserved for two-thousand years under volcanic ash; messages such as ‘burglar, watch out!’ and ‘I don’t want to sell my husband’ would perhaps not be appropriate nowadays.
All that time ago, one Roman wrote ‘I am amazed, O wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers’. Tedious stupidities! What an accusation! Did he not realise the profundity, the wisdom, the intellectual feats obtained by his fellow men? Perhaps the wall art of Pompeii was not quite of the standard of that of the English Faculty.
A reasoned assessment, naturally, yet still amongst our own contemporaries there are echoes of this Roman writer’s fury. ‘YOU ARE ALL FRAUDS!’ is screamed in multi-coloured bubble letters across the length of Cubicle II. ‘This is THE MOST pretentious graffiti I’ve ever read’, cries out a red-felt tip.
Well, of course! These walls do nothing to hide their self-importance – they embrace it, scribble it around the loo-roll holder, on the doors, high up above the level of seated eyesight. And therein lies the Ecstasy! This is their Thrill Factor, this is their privilege to uphold the OOSS (Ostentatious Oxford Student Stereotype)! Whether you relish the poetical quotes, the grammatical instructions or learn that Lemon Drizzle cake is ‘the most important, profound, meaningful discovery made at Oxford University… ever’, these walls will encourage self-induced self-importance and intentional incontinence.
Oh anonymous authors, where are you? Your bravery to sharpen your pencil and scribble for the sake of your University and your Subject is unrivalled. Show yourself, acknowledge your wittiness, your wisdom and your wiles as well as you reference your essays.
Your genius is at work whilst that of your revered authors sits on the pages upstairs and that of your lecturers in the next door rooms passes over the heads of many. Take longer in the bathroom and incorporate Cubicle Time into your lecture schedule (the second one down needs particular work). You are the Read. You are the Wisdom. Listen to Cubicle III – ‘TAKE BACK THE BLANK’.
