Oswaldo Encalada Vásquez "the word allows the being to emerge from chaos"
Oswaldo Encalada Vásquez is a writer, researcher and professor, his name is kept in a space of history in the city and the country, through his neat adventure with the sign.
Oswaldo Encalada Vásquez has constructed a discourse that challenges the word, language, its function and possibilities. Writer, researcher and professor, his name is kept in a space of history in the city and the country, through his neat adventure with the sign.
I was fortunate to be his student and to demonstrate how the projection of a teacher is established in coherence, knowledge and certainty, which allow him to manifest and let himself be understood by his presence ... that translates, unquestionably, in respect.
Days ago and in the personal library of Dr. Encalada, I returned to those intimate and kind hours of learning, about subjects as exciting as the ultimate truth that holds and that makes fun of words, to say it somehow ... but, how to start the dialogue with a figure who has been admired for so long? Well easy, nothing is done. The word is woven, alone, flowing between nearby themes, banks of the same river:
In Nature Language and Culture, one of his books of research and reflection on the Word, tells us, almost at the beginning: "To know is to name ..." that leads me to the notion of man as a sign in constant gestation ...
Yes. The powerful sense of meaning is terrible ... I have been reflecting a bit about that, following my text on Arthrology, coming to the conclusion that what the Bible says, without implying a religious position, is absolutely true. Let's remember. When the world, paradise, plants, animals and man have been created, God calls the creatures for Adam to give them a name; that is, before the imposition of the name, who or what were the creatures? At the moment in which there is a sign that fits or adheres to that reality, at that moment, that reality exists; in other words: the word allows the being to emerge from chaos.
Therefore, perhaps, Saint John says: "in the beginning was the Word". Is that what is there before? The chaos. As the Bible says: "in the beginning everything was chaos and the spirit of God floated in the water". Why does the Bible begin by naming things? I have asked myself: if God is all-powerful, how he conceives, he could have created without using words ... but he can not create without the word, because if he does not use them, the creatures continue to swim in chaos.
Could we follow what Walter Ong says, when he says that our conception of the cosmos would change, if our language did?
So is. Reality, which obviously exists, is an artificial creation, as a culture. For example: are there colors? People might say: "Yes, of course, you can see the rainbow, the colors of the flowers, etc.", but why do some cultures have 7 colors and others less? Because what exists is the vision of culture over colors! That vision is not reality, it is the part of cultural creation about reality and in that part we move. We are never in contact with things, but with that network that allows us to see them. So, what is culture? A construction made with words (the Word) about reality. That is why there are so many cultures, with the same human eyes, but with different notions about the same facts.
The Russian formalists considered language and structure as a modeling possibility (almost a century ago). How to understand that?
Language serves to shape the world (this is what the formalists say); then, of course, a knowledge of reality without language is impossible. For example, a child (in his first weeks) can see and hear everything that happens, but he can not differentiate a sound from the nature of a word, because he does not yet have the mental structure that culture provides: that is the modeling of the world.
And it is, then, a powerful tool to homogenize thought ...
Of course, yes, which has its positive and negative side. Because at the moment when we want to impose a way of seeing the world (a language), we are ruined, because culture disappears. It is our duty to maintain the different forms of culture, ways of seeing the world. When a language is lost, whoever loses is humanity, it becomes impoverished (not only the Zapara, or the Shuar, or the peoples of Africa, no) because a mythology, a worldview, a vision of the world disappear.
How are your passion and study of the linguistic sign and the investigation of the phenomenon of the language born?
Maybe the conviction that it is the first tool to know. If someone can not use the language to understand algebra, for example, he will not understand it ... if someone can not use the language to read Anthropology or Physics or Biology texts, he can not access that knowledge. Language is the first limit, the first edge, the first tool to access the world.
I can not move from my mind to the world, directly, I have to go through the language.
The 5 volumes of your Dictionary of Toponyms result from an investigation that took 15 years. How do you hold such a long breath?
Actually it took a little longer, between the 15 and 17. There I discovered many roots of unfortunately disappeared languages, cultures such as the Panzaleo, the Puruhá, the Paltas, the Caranquis ... and languages of the coastal area such as Cayapa Colorado. That work has allowed me to have in my mind a clear map of how they are and how the ethnic groups could be, through the words they left.
Along with his work as a researcher, he has a profuse production as a creator. Days ago I talked with Jorge Dávila and he told me that his figure, in Ecuadorian literature, is that of the precursor of the short story.
Yes, that is true. Fortunately, at this moment, that begins to be seen as a result of the publication of the Basic Library of Ecuatorian Authors, where it is recognized that the micro-story begins in our lyrics, with my text published in the 81. Texts up to 3 or 4 lines, basically oriented to two things: to describe a fundamental fact and to create an atmosphere that fits that fundamental fact. This brief exercise of story has been and continues to be my daily work. There is no day when he does not.
I find it interesting to think about how a researcher of the word, feels tempted to produce literary texts, in which the economy of the word prevails.
Interestingly, the roots of these events are in my time as a distant reader ... in school. And I'm surprised seeing myself reading things as disparate as Tagore and Einstein. How to understand this fact? And of course: the need to understand the world in two ways; the aesthetic that is irrational and emotive and the scientific way. Then, while Einstein talks to me about the situation of the observer in time and space, that there are no absolutes, Tagore does it for tea leaves, sanyasis, priests ... that translates into a very concise, short creation , which approaches the conciseness of science, but is involved in literature.
In his work there is constant contact with other spheres of reality. I refer to two of his books, basically: Salamah and the Randomized Bestiary ... They are built in other environments, realities, respecting and using formulas from their contexts.
I believe that our contact with the world, mediated by the word, allows me to say that all human beings have a scenario. And it would be better if that scenario were very rich. As Borges said, why can not we be the heirs of the whole universal culture? Obviously, the visible scenario of Salamah is the Arabian Nights. A little before writing my texts, I had finished reading the 10 volumes of that work. I was so fascinated with the expressive richness created by the words, symbolic, linguistic and mythological richness, that it was natural that Salamah was born. My head was full of these formulas and images and I quickly and easily wrote it, with the very nearby stage of the vast oriental world: dervishes, beggars, magicians, carpets, enchantments, rings, seas, sabers, mosques, and all that ... In the In the case of the Bestiary, the backdrop is the medieval world that (apart from its darkness and ignorance) was a very rich world in the verbal, in the mythological linguistic creation. Along with that, my taste for allegorical literature, like the emblems of Covarrubias (an allegory in the background is nothing more than a verbal world, which is coupled to an image and mutually explained). I wanted to make those kinds of texts where fantasy was justified through middle ages and allegory. The fantasy allowed me to make those kinds of constructions.
What is fantasy?
The human being can not live in a world without valid explanations for himself. It may be that these explanations do not agree with those of science, in fact it happens, that happens with the cultures that see the world and explain it from their point of view. In this case, fantasy allows us to explain the world through a path that is not scientific ...
With a firm trajectory and a name engraved in the national literary history, what is a challenge, what gives you satisfaction?
To be able to work a little more, every morning: in creation, research, in advancing a step in what I am doing. Now I am working on a children's text that is going to be called the Burbujigato; the challenge is to find the word I'm looking for, the saying, a tone: what the spider can say to the cat!
Satisfaction comes sometimes for something very small, like transplanting a plant and growing; or when I have achieved a solid, strong text; or when I find the words I'm looking for to be told by a mouse ...
What is discipline?
It is a way. There are many people who see discipline badly, especially in the art world, where they believe in chaos ... modestly I believe that all work must be disciplined. I do not know if it is Locke, who says that the lame in the road, ahead of the healthy out of it.
What books are indispensable?
Unfortunately many, many. But if I have to choose, Don Quixote de la Mancha would be in the first place; then the Divine Comedy would come; Macbeth and Hamlet, Shakespeare; on the Ecuadorian map :, poetry by Carrera Andrade, Escudero, Jara Idrovo; in novel, Los hijos, de Cuesta y Cuesta; in philosophy, inevitably Schopenhauer, but also Plato who is a kind of God for philosophy, not only for the purely philosophical part, but for the extreme amenity, something that does not happen with other philosophers, who are always very dry, very arid. Plato has, perhaps because it is contaminated with mythology, that very rich capacity to explain. Montaine, the fabulous Montaine of essays: a Greco-Roman philosopher who lived in the sixteenth century. The sonnets of Petrarch; Boccaccio, The Little Prince, The Lazarillo, would be many books ... difficult.
And of his own production?
I have much more love for children's texts ... it is not new, but it is the same as with parents: the last child is the most protected, inevitably.