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Interesting on Kafka "Give it Up"

"Give It Up!" Kafka stages the very problem of dialectics of representation at every turn of his writing. This makes him the quintessentially modern writer--his stories are always stories about the problem of storytelling itself. They are stories that force the reader into an active critical exchange, in which reading becomes a laborious effort but also a liberating experience.

"Give It Up!" is one of his shortest stories, and it illustrates in an exemplary fashion the complexity of reading Kafka.

One could talk about this story aimlessly, but let us look at the most crucial elements of Kafka's world. Time and space are modulated, dissolving or in question. It seems to be a dinnertime, an objective time, a subjective time, an internal time, an external time. The question is: What time is real time, is there real time, is there real space? It is a strange world where the narrator loses any point of reference or orientation.

What does the policeman mean? In German, he uses the word for policeman--Schutzmann--which literally means "the man who protects you." But Kafka often replaces or supplements words, so if you take Schutzmann and think about what other words you have in German, you also have Schutzengel, "the angel," your personal protective angel. So it becomes unclear who that policeman is; the authority is not clearly assigned. It's really a metaphorical police.

What I'm driving at are the multiple levels of the story. You can interpret this story along the line of existentialism, or nihilism: There is no meaning in life, and you should just give it up. There's also a religious dimension: a general, universal religious moment of loss of authority, of lost values, the death of God. (Nietzsche sort of hovers in the back of the mind.) There are also the rather specific Jewish traditional elements with which Kafka sometimes plays. This story can also be read in a political way as a critique of ideology: Don't believe anyone; only believe yourself. You can also read "Give It Up!" psychologically, in that the protagonist is a psychologically insecure person.

The point in Kafka is that you cannot reduce his work to any one of those elements. Of course, we also have several literary elements in this story. Kafka takes on a lot of tradition: there is expressionism, surrealism, minimalism and anti-romanticism. Kafka is so great to teach because with Kafka you can rehearse all theoretical approaches to literature.

No single approach satisfies all segments of Kafka's writing. In Kafka there's a strict untranslatability, because you always end up reducing and altering the meaning of whatever you are trying to translate. That's what the story keeps hammering home, that there is a meaning, and you have to reconstruct it in your own readings.