The Court and the Castle

Excerpts from "Questions of Error", The New York Times, November 3, 1957 By NEWTON ARVIN Delivered originally as the Terry Lectures at Yale, the chapters of "The Court and the Castle" indicate to us what a very "high" Calvinist Miss West has become - a supralapsarian even, one suspects, of a more rigorous sort that John Calvin himself. She is studying here a series of writers, mostly but not entirely English - beginning with Shakespeare and including Proust, Henry James, Kipling, Trollope, Kafka - from the point of view of their acceptance or rejection of two Calvinist dogmas, that of total depravity and that of predestination or absolute decrees. The Court of Miss West's title is, first, the literal court as one finds it in Shakespeare's history plays, in "Hamlet" and so on, but it is also a complex symbol of political authority, social order, legitimacy, or even simply of the social group as opposed to the individual. Not only so, but in "Hamlet," Miss West believes, the court, with its ingrained corruption and its dependence on rescue from without, has become a theological symbol also - a symbol of the depraved and un-free human will and its helpless dependence on divine grace. The Castle of the title is, of course, Kafka's Castle, and it serves as a very similar symbol - a symbol of the modern bureaucratic system from which Kafka suffered but in the legitimacy of which he believed. Beyond this it is a symbol of the inscrutable and often apparently cruel divine order in which nevertheless he also believed.