Two Kafka Plays: Kafka's Dick and the Insurance Man

by Alan Bennett

Book by Bennett, Alan

Genres: Drama, Plays, Literature, Theatre

156 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1987

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Alan Bennett is an English author and Tony Award-winning playwright. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor. Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a slight Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Reviews

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kafka’s Dick by Alan Bennett
Outré, but for all the provocative, somewhat outrageous title, this play has some serious topics, if approached in a jocular manner.


We have plenty of literary, at times psychoanalytical, then psychological references to Fitzgerald, Hitler, Freud, Proust and many more writers and famous figures.
From the start, we listen to a dialogue between Franz Kafka
- Max, I want you to burn all my works
- Franz, you really want to do this
- Yes, it must be done
- All right, burn, baby burn
These are not the words in the play that anyway takes liberties and a light tone in dealing with a serious matter.
Indeed, Max Brod has not respected the wishes of his friend- only friend as we are later told-and that is an important issue in here.
- I keep hearing the same question all over again
- Instead of congratulating me, people keep asking – why didn’t you burn all his manuscripts…?
There is a quandary here, although not a major moral question, if you want my opinion:
- Do you need to obey the last wishes?
- Yes, but when we are dealing with depriving humanity of such precious work, there is no question where the right answer lies
After this initial conversation that verges on the absurd and even touches on the improper, but with the obvious intention to be thought provoking and humorous, we meet other characters:
Sydney is an insurance salesman that has a penchant for literature, but in a shallow form- I guess I can relate to this guy, even if this is somewhat embarrassing, but hey, we share a rather light interest in books…it could have been worse.
He vents his knowledge of quite petty, quiz show information of small value in front of his ignorant wife- Linda:
- Did you know that Hitler and Wittgenstein went to the same school
They move on to discuss other trivia or gossip columns, tabloid material that may or may not be relevant:

- Some psychologists have studied the works of Kafka and arrived to some conclusions, among which they mentioned that he had a small penis- ergo the title?
Scott F. Fitzgerald is then mentioned as having the same small size…it appears that Hemingway was on the subject and Zelda talked about it.
E.M. Forster is also brought in as a subject, with his gay relationship with a (married) policeman that albeit of vulgar interest, may cast a light on some of his works…or may not
A connection is also made between Dostoyevsky, Kafka and…Hitler of all people:
- In Crime and Punishment there is a suspected killer who is a house painter
- Joseph K. is also suspected of a crime committed by…a house painter
- Hitler is again suspected of being a…house painter
Provocation and hilarity are intended by the author and these notes on various authors intrigue me, where I did not know about them.
If Freud wanted to appear bigger, E.M. Forster and Kafka were on the opposite end, with every intention to diminish themselves.
Sydney wrote in his amateur paper something like:
- Kafka related to smaller and smaller beings- ape, turtle, beetle- if he would have carried on like this, we would need a microscope to study his work
In an absurd, bordering on the outré incident the dead Max Brod shows up at Sydney’s door, where he pees on the turtle- the latter occurrence is futile to say the least.
Other than that the play is rather good, if too liberal in the title and some of its initiatives for this conventional, perhaps even reactionary reader.
Proust is compared with Kafka, and albeit praised and rightly placed at the top of the literary establishment, they need to talk about his preference for “boys”.
Bennett is rather interested in homosexuality that appears frequently, in various guises in his works, for a reason.

He knows about this and so many subjects, the author being an erudite and very witty, innovative and creative playwright.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

KD is fun and uncliched but quite didactic. Its irreverence is not mostly directed at Kafka, despite the aggressive-seeming title.

IM relies heavily on lighting, juxtaposition, and Daniel Day-Lewis' tics. Either play is much more likely to endear Kafka to you than his own books, or any of the absurd battery of critical texts on him.

This is my favourite thing on Kafka:

There are many perils in writing about Kafka. His work has been garrisoned by armies of critics with some fifteen thousand books about him at the last count. As there is a Fortress Freud so is there a Fortress Kafka, Kafka his own castle. For admission a certain high seriousness must be deemed essential and I am not sure I have it. One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself. Like the Hebrew name of God, it is a name that should not be spoken, particularly by an Englishman. In his dreams Kafka once met an Englishman. He was in a good grey flannel suit, the flannel also covering his face... The Channel is a slipper bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom. This propensity I am sure I have not escaped or tried to: but then there is something that is English about Kafka, and it is not only his self-deprecation. A vegetarian and fond of the sun, he seems a familiar crank; if he’d been living in England at the turn of the century, and not in Prague, one can imagine him going out hiking and spending evenings with like-minded friends in Letchworth...

In that department [DIY] certainly Kafka did not excel. He was not someone you would ask to help put up a shelf, for instance, though one component of his charm was an exaggerated appreciation of people who could, and of commonplace accomplishments generally. Far from being clumsy himself (he had something of the dancer about him), he would marvel (or profess to marvel) at the ease with which other people managed to negotiate the world. This kind of professed incompetence (‘Silly me!’) often leads to offers of help, and carried to extremes it encourages the formation of unofficial protection societies. Thus Kafka was much cosseted by the ladies in his office and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s.

One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The snag is that when the person doing the marvelling goes on to do great things this can leave those with the commonplace accomplishments feeling a little flat. Say such a person goes on to win the Nobel Prize: it is scant consolation to know that one can change a three-pin plug.

Gorky said that in Chekhov’s presence everyone felt a desire to be simpler, more truthful and more oneself. Kafka too had this effect. ‘On his entrance into a room,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘it seemed as though some unseen attendant had whispered to the lecturer: “Be careful about everything you say from now on. Franz Kafka has just arrived.” ’ To have this effect on people is not an unmixed blessing. When we are on our best behaviour we are not always at our best.

This is not to say that Kafka did not make jokes in life and in art. The Trial, for instance, is a funnier book than it has got credit for and Kafka’s jokes about himself are the better for the desperate circumstances in which they were often made. He never did win the Nobel Prize but contemplated the possibility once in fun and in pain, and in a fairly restricted category (though one he could have shared with several contemporaries, Proust, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence among them). When he was dying of TB of the larynx he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so physically painful to make), ‘I think I deserve the Nobel Prize for sputum.’ Nothing if not sick, it is a joke that could have been made yesterday.

Dead sixty-odd years, Kafka is still modern and there is much in the present-day world to interest him. These days Kafka would be intrigued by the battery farm and specifically, with an interest both morbid and lively, in the device that de-beaks the still-living chickens; in waste-disposal trucks that chew the rubbish before swallowing it; and those dubious restaurants that install for your dining pleasure a tank of doomed trout. As the maître d’ assists the discerning diner in the ceremony of choice, be aware of the waiter who wields the net: both mourner and executioner, he is Kafka. He notes old people in Zimmer frames stood in their portable dock on perambulatory trial for their lives. He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball and the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth... he would be concerned with the current debate on the disposal of nuclear waste. To be placed in a lead canister which is then encased in concrete and sunk fathoms deep to the floor of the ocean was the degree of circulation he thought appropriate for most of his writing. Or not, of course...

Had Kafka the father emigrated to America as so many of his contemporaries did, things might have turned out differently for Kafka the son. He was always stage-struck. Happily lugubrious, he might have turned out a stand-up Jewish comic. Kafka at Las Vegas.

Why didn’t Kafka stutter? The bullying father, the nervous son – life in the Kafka household seems a blueprint for a speech impediment. In a sense, of course, he did stutter. Jerky, extruded with great force and the product of tremendous effort, everything Kafka wrote is a kind of stutter. Stutterers devise elaborate routines to avoid or to ambush and take by surprise troublesome consonants, of which K is one of the most difficult. It’s a good job Kafka didn’t stutter. With two Ks he might have got started on his name and never seen the end of it. As it is, he docks it, curtails it, leaves its end behind much as lizards do when something gets hold of their tail.

...Hermann Kafka has had such a consistently bad press that it’s hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy for him as for all the Parents of Art. They never get it right. They bring up a child badly and he turns out a writer, posterity never forgives them – though without that unfortunate upbringing the writer might never have written a word. They bring up a child well and he never does write a word. Do it right and posterity never hears about the parents: do it wrong and posterity never hears about anything else.

You do not necessarily need to read Kafka's Dick after reading that.