“Grins for clerks”: reflections on the short stories of Virgilio Piñera

Abstract

Concepts of eccentricity and outskirts are frequent at Latin American studies, where they have come to constitute a category of study and canonisation. Cuban Virgilio Piñera reflects well this labels, as he avoids neither stylistic nor generational ascriptions to forge his unmistakable literary language. This finds its grounds on different notions of absurdity, grotesque, existentialism and neofantasy, tools that defy every rational logics to offer epistemological alternatives to modern man. From here on, he confers a fundamental role to the flesh, in the sense that it is a rhetoric that obviates the soul/body binomial, thus setting the body as an instrument of freedom or resistance to alienation. In this sense, and despite of his condition as a dissident, Piñera constitutes a perfect representative of  a kind of a certain epoch’s spirit.