Juego de mapas

cartografie letterarie della narrativa breve di Max Aub

Abstract

The article delves into a selection of short fiction works by Max Aub, considering as a methodological starting point the modular and fragmented pattern of Juego de cartas (1964), which brings to the extreme the conception of literature and inter-artistic expression of a universe dominated by the disintegration of traditional realist codes. The practice of reconstruction and recombination of epistles that seek to shed light on the identity of a mysterious deceased person constitutes an allegory and a manifesto of the author's poetics. Juego de cartas provides a key to read Aub’s work, which cannot ignore the pictorial legacy of Jusep Torres Campalans, an apocryphal but authentic ecphrasis of the Aubian world. This epistemic framework is placed in dialectical relation with the reflection on the various maps that Aub’s narrative treasures and that are often woven around a void, an absence, those incompatible places that exile brings and that the space of writing attempts to rescue.