The body is one of the great obsessions of Virgilio Piñera and this obsession manifests itself in an insistent way throughout his works. In this essay I will discuss the various instances in which the body-and its raw material, the fleshbreaks into Cuentos fríos and how these irruptions operate within the framework of a literary style in which, according to Antón Arrufat, the soul does not go to the body but rather the body moves towards a certain "hypothetical soul". A productive conflict between the self and the body is then established through this displacement: a body always on alert, on the verge of breakdown.
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