I found Distant Star to be deceptively easy to read, maybe the easiest in this class so far, yet extremely ambiguous in its themes. It’s clearly another book that the shadow of Borges looms large over, both as an influence and a foil. Bolaño has a similar way of writing to Borges, full of literary name-dropping that blends real-world figures with fictional characters and speculation on the nature of writing with a first-person narrator who mostly serves as a stand-in for the author. I was fully expecting the ending to echo the twist in “Death and the Compass” by revealing that Romero’s contract was an elaborate hoax by Wieder himself in the hopes of leading the narrator into one of his traps; however, while it’s quite possible that Wieder was the unnamed employer, the book ends without any major shakeups. Yet Bolaño also seems distinctly anti-Borges at times, not least in his political themes and skepticism towards the avant-garde. Considering Borges’s infamous support for Pinochet’s regime, I have to wonder whether he had any influence on the character of Carlos Wieder.

Wieder/Ruiz-Tagle is clearly the centerpiece of this book: the mysterious poet/pilot with uncertain motives, the pioneer of fascist art, or, as I would argue, artistic fascism. “Fascist art” (if such a thing could be called art) brings to mind propaganda glorifying the supremacy of the fatherland (e.g. Triumph of the Will), and, though Wieder does partake in this (as in his “Antarctica is Chile” stunt), I got the impression that straightforward ideological faith wasn’t his guiding motive. He seems to understand fascism less as a program to be strictly upheld than as an aesthetic object free from moral judgement, valuable primarily as a spectacle representing the extremities of humanity – which is to say, his artistic values influenced his politics rather than the other way around.

Though the avant-garde is typically associated with the political left (understandably so, considering their shared critique of existing norms and the very fact that some degree of tolerance is a precondition for artistic experimentation), it isn’t unheard of for right-wing figures to make waves in otherwise forward-thinking art: Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalí, even Borges himself. It’s hard to make sweeping generalizations about such figures, but they generally seem to see in fascism a bulwark against “degeneracy,” an elitist tradition that aggrandizes the role of the “higher arts” that must be upheld in order to be transgressed (but only so far as such transgressions are agreeable right-wing ideology). In the lecture, fascism is described as strictly separating art from politics; while this is sometimes the case, as with those “apolitical” artists who quietly supported brutal regimes (Dalí and Borges), it doesn’t account for the importance of figures like Wagner or Pound in inspiring nationalist pride, or Wieder himself, for whom politics and art are directly linked. If anything, fascism is the aestheticization of politics by way of propaganda, the reduction of complex multifaceted societies to the image of a shared national spirit based on an imagined tradition and contrasted against an antagonistic other. When fascism turns against art, it is because it questions the supremacy of this universal aesthetic, suggesting that there are other ways of living in contradiction to the state narrative. Thus, if Wieder was ultimately cast out of fascist circles and forgotten by Chile, this was because he took this aestheticization too far: he found artistic value in even the parts of Pinochet’s regime that weren’t meant to be made public. Whether he himself realized that his aesthetic adherence to fascism ultimately ended in its implicit critique is uncertain.

What do others think of the distinction between “fascist art” and “artistic fascism”? Which side do you think Wieder falls on?