MUCH admired by eminent South American writers like Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez for whom he was an inspiring precursor, directing their literary imagination to make their own discoveries of the magical relationship between language and the dream of existence, and highly praised by some North American and European writers, including Italo Calvino who considered him incomparably original, yet over 50 years after his death, Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) remains a neglected figure in an obscure corner of the literary pantheon, unnoticed by the public dazzled by the brightly lit monuments to Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges.

English-language readers can discover his singularly enchanting world in two books — Lands of Memory (translated by Esther Allen) and Piano Stories (translated by Luis Harss), both beautifully rendered from the original Spanish and thankfully kept in print in America by New Directions. Both books contain short introductory essays that stimulate a new reader’s interest, from which one learns that he was born in Uruguay, that his first job at the age of 15 in 1917 was to play the piano in the cinema showing silent movies, that he became a concert pianist and wrote short fictions which, though written mostly as direct first-person narratives, reveal a strikingly original imagination.

In her preface to Piano Stories, Francine Prose, herself a fine writer, makes the perceptive observation that in Hernández’s stories “familiar notions of causality no longer apply, and yet the sequence of events seems correct, as it does in dreams, even when people and objects behave in unlikely ways”; and in his introduction to the volume, Calvino remarks on how Hernández infuses “the quasi oneiric automatism of his imagination” into his stories by creating the appearance of a traditional narrative while “making room for a play within a play, of setting up games within the story, the rules of which he lays down each time anew”.

Hernández himself, in a brief essay, ‘How Not to Explain My Stories’, suggesting that he had no conscious awareness of the creative process that controlled the direction of the emerging narrative, stated: “My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me.” For him writing was an organic process, like a plant coming into existence: when it had blossomed fully, it had come about because it had completed an intricate pattern that was nourished by deep roots, giving each story “a strange life of its own”. As with any botanical specimen, all artistic originality is an ongoing evolutionary development of which the creative imagination’s new aesthetic pattern, with its natural incorporation of the previous stages of its evolution, is but the latest formulation of what thrills the perceiving senses as beauty. Hernández’s genius is that he produces not just one flower, but a dazzling bouquet.

Incidentally, the title, ‘How Not to Explain My Stories’, echoes the title of one of the important texts of modern literature, Raymond Roussel’s ‘How I Wrote Certain of My Books’, the essay in which he demonstrates how it is not a writer’s experience of the world but his manipulation of language into an intellectually conceived design that creates literature. Hernández spent two years in Paris after World War II and it is unlikely that he would have heard of Roussel who had died, neglected and obscure, in the previous decade, but though, unlike the Frenchman, Hernández drew a good deal from his own experience in his fictions, he would have agreed with Roussel’s general principle of the primacy of language in literature, for that is what, in his own original way, he himself went on to do.

Unlike some other modern writers — e.g., Donald Barthelme, B.S. Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates — who sometimes projected original forms through non-verbal impressions or unusual typographical layouts on the physical page that caught the reader’s attention with their startling novelty, Hernández stays with apparently conventional narrative forms in which the surprise of his original perception is shaped by his arrangement of the physical images of experience in sentences that convert that surprise into a delightful conviction. On first reading, a story like ‘The Stray Horse’, in which the narrator remembers going for his piano lessons when he was 10, seems like a familiar childhood memoir of innocent exploration in a confusing world of surfaces — like the opening passage in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations where in the fog by the river the boy Pip first sees a strange vision of the world, which he says was his “first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things”. But the sharp imagery capturing those surfaces transforms ordinary reality into one infused with a special private meaning. Walking past a blossoming magnolia tree in the street, inhaling its strong scent, the Hernández boy enters his piano teacher Celina’s house where, while waiting alone in the room and glancing at the objects around him, he feels the magnolia’s “presence, light as a breath somehow blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room and blending into the furniture”. His childish imagination reinvents the world, seeing objects as coloured and perfumed by sensations from a previous experience.

We never live in an exclusive now, suggests Hernández, for multiple layers of memory accompany us to each successive now, and nothing is ever itself, for we look at the world from a contaminated point of view. The boy in ‘The Stray Horse’ touches a woman’s marble bust, holding her hair in one hand and stroking her with the other, and she seems so much like a real woman that he enjoys the sense of “giving in to a forbidden pleasure”; but his pleasure is succeeded by sadness that the throat he has been caressing is only a piece of marble, though, when others are present in the room, he feels “a certain complicity” with the marble woman as if, seeing her across the room, he shared a secret with her. He sees inanimate objects engaged in mysterious actions and finds himself acting in secret collusion with them. The piano is like a “nice person” whose keys he sees as black and white fingers playing with his fingers, giving him the impression that “combining the sounds with our fingers we both felt sad”.

The narrative of ‘The Stray Horse’ stops abruptly and Hernández begins a second part with the statement that something “unexpected has happened”. Where we had been following a child’s configuration of reality, we are now pulled into a reality that is configured by memory — a memory, however, that is not the protagonist’s but is being projected on the protagonist’s mind by the other in him who determines what he must witness. His soul, he says, “settles down comfortably to remember” like his body does at the movies, and he adds: “I don’t know whether I am working the projector myself or even whether I came on my own or someone prepared the memory for me and brought me to it”. Hernández now abandons the pretence of a narrative about the child’s experience and makes memory itself the subject of his discourse, which, philosophically brilliant, nevertheless conveys the impression that the story told earlier is being redefined by being cast in an abstract dimension, though the prose continues to glimmer with bright images and conceals its discursive thrust, so that the reader ends by imagining the story more vividly while simultaneously having a profound understanding of the nature of memory itself. Some readers will be reminded of the opening passage of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Time Past; others of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and of Ivan Bunin’s The Well of Days; like them, Hernández examines the experience of “plunging deeper into the centre” of oneself, “shrinking from sight like a microbe contracting under a lens”.

Each of the 12 stories that follow ‘The Stray Horse’ surprises the reader with its content, tone and style. One of the most direct, ‘My First Concert’, is an amusing account of a pianist’s nervous tension before and during his debut performance, which, while it entertains, also works as a metaphor for the creative artist’s struggle to overcome the initial mental block until, once the brain becomes immersed in the work it is, as with Hernández’s character once he begins to perform, “like being in a magician’s den” where he is fired up to follow the magician’s “every inspiration”.

Entirely different and intellectually more complex is the novella ‘The Daisy Dolls’ in which Hernández produces his version of the male fantasy of possessing a female so subservient to his will that she is a mechanical doll, like Olympia in Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann or the mechanical doll who becomes the president-elect of the USA in Thomas Berger’s 2004 novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman. The male in Hernández’s story, Horace, dreading a future without his wife Mary, decides to have a doll made to resemble her whom he names Daisy. A confusion of identities is one outcome that creates humorous situations, as when seeing Mary’s dress caught in a door and thinking she is spying on him, he suddenly opens the door only to have Daisy fall on him, having been dressed by Mary in her clothes to play a joke on him; or having fallen asleep one night with Mary in bed with him, he touches her arm in the morning to find it cold — Mary had slipped out of bed replacing herself with Daisy.

While more comical situations keep the reader highly amused at the literal level, the text takes on a philosophical suggestiveness as Hernández develops Horace’s growing obsession with mechanical dolls, and the idea begins to emerge that human perception is a form of madness. Then, of course, for the 21st-century reader there’s the new perspective that Hernández could not have anticipated but which is nevertheless prompted by the philosophical undercurrent in his prose, of people with heart, or kidney or liver, transplants or even a head transplanted on another’s body, that keeps mechanical movement alive in bodies which would otherwise be dead, making many humans into de facto mechanical dolls, which, surely, annihilates the ideas of reincarnation and resurrection or an afterlife.

The content of some of the Piano Stories — ‘The Woman Who Looked Like Me’, in which the narrator suspects that he was once a horse and tells a story of his “horse memory”, ‘The Flooded House’ about a woman who has flooded her house as if she wished to drown in sorrow at the death of her husband — is so novel as to be almost recklessly chosen, but with each Hernández converts the highly improbable into the absolutely credible and, doing so, creates a deeply engrossing and entertaining narrative in a language rich with striking images that transport a dazzling range of ideas to the reader’s mind without anything being told. And Hernández’s imagery doesn’t go for the cheap trick of magical realism of combining far-fetched opposites in a juxtaposition that appears momentarily marvellous but soon acquires the dullness of an old sepia photograph; his images, surprising and playful constructions sometimes but always sharply focused, come from an imagination stimulated by pure perception projecting wonderful sequences in the writer’s mind. That is how great literature works and how the most complex ideas are transmitted.

One of Hernández’s finest longer works is the title story of Lands of Memory, which contains four other stories and the opening novella titled ‘Around the Time of Clemente Colling’ that establishes the theme of memory. The first-person narrative of ‘Lands of Memory’ deploys a traditional, very familiar style with the narrator going on a train journey and, looking at the land outside the window, having several memories which he presents as flashbacks. Now, this is a common technique that usually produces a fairly commonplace story of limited interest and no aesthetic appeal as opposed to the Flaubertian ideal of creating the illusion of a moving immediate present as if the reader were living the experience of that moment even as his eyes looked at the words on the page and simultaneously received a silent flow of complex ideas into his consciousness. What is extraordinary about Hernández is that he can take a hackneyed technique but create his story in so remarkable a language, making the situation take on a vivid cinematic presence, that the framework becomes invisible, and as one memory dovetails into another the reader becomes entirely immersed in the narrator’s life and does not notice the sleight of hand with which the writer performs his magic.

It’s all in the prose, in the way a sentence is constructed so that it shows the immediate situation, often employing a simile that springs a metaphorical surprise through which an essential idea is conveyed. In a scene showing the narrator playing a nocturne on a piano, Hernández writes: “[The nocturne] opened with a series of great, grave chords; I played them with my hands spread wide, at the deliberate pace of a medium placing her hands on the table and awaiting the arrival of spirits.” As he plays, the audience asks him for a short melody, and Hernández writes: “I was prepared for this the way a lady is prepared for the photographer to take her by surprise”.

Ours is an anguished remembrance of our earlier self that, says Hernández, makes “the world revolve vertiginously backward” with “memories industriously recomposing the past”; the world takes a dizzying spin, oscillates, moves forward, and at other times revolves “too slowly… as if time were made of rubber and the world were having some difficulty stretching it”. One could quote many more sentences, for his exhilarating prose shimmers with ideas and wit and the whole effect is so brilliant that the temptation to quote them is irresistible — “…the door, which was closed, mute, its glass panes whitish and opaque like cataracts in a blind man’s eyes” — but to do so would oblige one to copy down almost all of the text of Lands of Memory. And incidentally, he can be very funny, as when he makes a character say, “I love my illness more than life. If I ever thought I might get well it would kill me.”

ZULFIKAR GHOSE is a poet, novelist and literary critic. Apart from criticism and poetry, he has also penned many novels, including the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian. He is professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.