The Paradox of Door-Keeping: Access and Absurdity, Then and Now

Abstract

While conducting research in the Franz Kafka archives of the Bodleian Library of Oxford University in 2019, I understood concretely the dark logic of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s structural world. The absurd dream architectures of the Alice books by the author we know as Lewis Carroll emanate from the built place itself. A lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church, Carroll became famous with his publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871. Segmented by walls and punctuated by sudden openings, the insurmountable reality of Oxford’s architecture testifies to its institutional culture of hierarchy, separation, and inaccessibility. Oxford’s thirteenth-century stone walls enclose buildings from the late Anglo-Saxon period during the eleventh century through the twenty-first century. Original Gothic architecture and Victorian Revival forms dominate the skyline visible just above the top of the walls, with varied combinations of gates, towers, spires, domes, rib vaults, buttresses, stained glass, and narrow windows. Even newer colleges built during the seventeenth century such as Brasenose, its gabled dormers and pale yellow stonework a charming relief from the dark and weathered thirteenth-century town walls, cohere with the experience of repetition and imposition while travelling alongside Oxford’s walls. However dominant its walls may seem, Oxford’s doors are truly the keys to its logic. Though doors everywhere and throughout time speak to our shared concepts of protection, permission, and access, these doors speak the particular language of door-keeping. I illustrate the relatively continuous logic of locked doors before and after 9/11, using the examples of Oxford architectures, Carroll’s paradoxical Victorian doors, and the automatic locking doors of airplanes in the twenty-first century.