The Writing of Carlos Casares: A Poetics of Literary Description

Abstract

Statements by an author on the way of conceiving literary creation are fairly frequent in poetry, so that it could even be affirmed that few authors do not have at least a poetic composition that deals with poetry itself, but this is not so frequent in narrative texts. Analyses of the mechanisms of literary creation, such as ‘Philosophy of composition’ by Edgar Allan Poe, have been the focus of much critical attention. In Galician literature, Carlos Casares is particularly interesting from this point of view, since he is, no doubt, one of the narrators with a higher self-consciousness and he expressed, in quite an explicit way, a reflection on the mechanisms of his work, dwelling particularly on the role of description. Casares makes descriptive details responsible for the verisimilitude and the efficacy of the whole narrative text. Analysing the work of this writer in the light of his theory of literary description is highly revealing. The way in which he particularly conceives description and its role within narrative texts contains a key, maybe the most important one, to understand how he builds worlds in his literary work.