Metamorphosis in Three Short Stories by Max Aub: Duplications, a Story of Serpents, and the Earth as Matrix

Abstract

This paper examines the presence of repetition, duplication, and metamorphosis in the fantastic narratives that Max Aub wrote during his exile in Mexico. Through an analysis of three short stories: “La verruga”, “La ingratitud”, and “La gran guerra”, this study explores how these narrative strategies construct a model of unstable subjectivity and a poetics that dissolves the hierarchies between the human, the natural, and the material. The motif of the double, interpreted through Michel Foucault’s reading of Raymond Roussel, reveals Aub’s writing as a space where consciousness extends beyond the individual subject. In this light, Iversen’s (2012) notion of “intermental mind” is particularly relevant for understanding the distribution of consciousness among characters, animals, and objects that defines these stories. The analysis also draws on Alber and Nielsen’s (2016) theory of unnatural narratives, which conceives the break with mimesis as a way of rethinking the relationship between fiction and reality. Within this framework, Aub’s metamorphoses transform not only bodies and voices but also the very matter of language, creating a literary ecology where the human, the animal, and the inanimate partake in a shared web of existence.