The Katak by Spregelburd and the Triumph of a Speech without Language

Abstract

The paper analyzes Rafael Spregelburd´s La Terquedad (The Stubbornness) based on an interpretation of the notion of stubbornness as Planc’s nonsense of stubbornly pursuiting sense through the invention of an artificial, numerical and universal language that cancels the differences, supported on the protagonist’s desire to give back to men that primitive faculty that God once gave them of a speech without language. Our investigation is based on an analysis of the temporal organization of facts in the play’s plot, which begins and ends with the primitive man, with the negation of language; even of the artificial one invented by Planc: that numerical alphabet proposed as a solution to the capricious multiplication of its own words carried out by each language. We understand that the play rests on a circular structuring of the fable that reproduces the stubbornness of the protagonist and helps to highlight a notion of language without relation to the world, a language turned on itself.