La familia Coconeta and El armario de Elena: Two Unknown Micro-plays by Max Aub

Abstract

Max Aub was an emblematic writer of the Spanish Republican exile of 1939; he cultivated all literary genres, and is better known as his work as novelist, however, he also privileged theatre among his literary production. This is proved not only by his fifty dramatic works published in life, but also by his almost thirty unpublished pieces. In addition, there are short plays inserted in works of other genres that have gone unnoticed by critics, or plays that were published posthumously in collector's editions. This is the case of the two micro-plays studied in this paper: La Familia Coconeta and El armario de Elena. In such plays, framed within the aesthetics of the absurd, Aub proposes an auto-fictional game in which he turns his family and himself into characters whose purpose is purely playful. In this article, we analyze the content of both plays, we try to find out their distinctive keys and we aim at underlining their intertextuality and transculturality, as well as look into his writing process through textual materials located in different international archives.