The Warp of Territory and the Woof of Orality in Carlos Casares

Abstract

This paper examines how the weft of orality is woven into the warp of territory in Carlos Casares’ fiction, and how the territory is transformed as a consequence of literary acts. The analysis focuses on his first works as Cambio en tres and Xoguetes para un tempo prohibido. The examination draws on geocritical approaches, which view space – literature – space relationships in a dialectical way. These dynamic connections between territory and literary text, in Casares’ novels and short stories, are discussed with particular attention to fiction set in his homeland of the Limia, Xinzo or Beiro and Ourense, and to how his spare style reflects the spare landscape, which in turn influences the fiction of another author from the Limia, Antón Riveiro Coello. Casares’ discourse about the relationships between literature and territory in his essays and journalistic pieces is also explored, both considerations about his own childhood’s spaces and about these relationsh ips in the literature of other authors as Otero Pedrayo. We argue that one of the dimensions of Casares’ childhood territory is oral discourse, sources and resources from Galician and from his own family’s oral tradition.