Los filólogos de José Bergamín o cuando la alfabetización produce la confusión babélica

Resumen

José Bergamín wrote in 1925 Los filólogos, a comedy where he satirizes the desire to enclose language in labels and cards, losing in this way and the understanding and communication. On other occasions, the Spanish playwright had used themes and characters from Greek tragedy, and this time José Bergamín uses Aristophanes’s Birds as an “artefacto” to satirize the Center for Historical Studies, directed and founded by Menéndez Pidal in 1910 and where Pedro Salinas and Enrique Díaz Canedo collaborated. The play serves to criticize the first studies on Phonetics and Phonology by Tomás Navarro Tomás and the effort to explain Literature with labels by Américo Castro. In the opposite part, Bergamín proposes the poetic and literary vision of authors such as Valle-Inclán or Unamuno, who did not want to enclose or explain scientifically the language. The comedy, therefore, parodies the eagerness to literate to explain the language, because, in the opinion of the writer, paradoxically, this literacy means the end of culture, as reflected in 1933 in his essay La decadencia del analfabetismo. Los filólogos denote the influence of Greek comedy in various scenes and characters and allows us to contemplate on stage not only the Chorus of Birds, but also that of Monkeys, Satyrs and Chips. Above all, the comedy represented a hymn to the best of language to reach everyone and achieve communication between different people: its freedom and multiple possibilities; not having to confine to a cage or enslaving label. It seems, in this way, that philological study, taken as a simple science and forgetting the artistic aspect, becomes a meaningless dialogue of monkeys and birds; a hubbub that, as in the Tower of Babel, prevents men from understanding each other.