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Late in a 1952 essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Borges mentions what he describes, quite unexpectedly, as “the curious veneration North Americans render to realistic” works of literature (Other Inquisitions 64). But then, having tantalized his reader with this hitherto unexamined (though not unrelated) tidbit, he drops it, only to return to it a couple of lines later by suggesting that it implies the need for a mysterious and as yet non-existent comparison between realistic writing in the United States and Argentina. If I am correct in my reading of this essay, Borges, whose English was excellent and who taught the literature of the United States for many years at the University of Buenos Aires, wants his audience to envision a new and expanded approach to American literary history, which he understands, already in the lecture of 1949 and in the essay it becomes in 1952, not as the exclusive province of a single nation but in its hemispheric sense.In this essay, I will argue this position—that Borges is inviting us here to view what are, for him, American literature’s two very different conceptions of literary realism: one, the old, traditional kind so venerated (claims Borges) by North Americans and the other a new and more language-based kind, one known, famously, in Latin American literary circles as “la nueva narrativa,” the “new narrative,” and one actualized, for the first time in Spanish America, by Borges in his “ficciones,” which were published as separate pieces during the 1930s and early 1940s. My thesis is that, in “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Borges is trying to get us to set up a future comparative study of realism in the U. S. literary tradition and in that of Argentina, which, by extension, we should read as Spanish America. In doing this, we see the emergence of Borges’s theory of American narrative history, that—with certain exceptions—(Hawthorne, Poe, and Faulkner)—U. S. fiction has remained too closely aligned with traditional notions of western realism while the fiction of Argentina (and Spanish America) has not. While this well-known essay is, indeed, about the narrative art of Hawthorne (an author Borges lauds here for his cultivation of the allegorical method), it is also—though much less obviously—about something else, a theory Borges has about the nature of literary realism in the Americas.
