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\u2019s clearly another book that the shadow of Borges looms large over, both as an influence and a foil. Bola\u00f1o 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 \u201cDeath and the Compass\u201d by revealing that Romero\u2019s contract was an elaborate hoax by Wieder himself in the hopes of leading the narrator into one of his traps; however, while it\u2019s quite possible that Wieder was the unnamed employer, the book ends without any major shakeups. Yet Bola\u00f1o also seems distinctly anti-Borges at times, not least in his political themes and skepticism towards the avant-garde. Considering Borges\u2019s infamous support for Pinochet\u2019s regime, I have to wonder whether he had any influence on the character of Carlos Wieder.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cFascist art\u201d (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 \u201cAntarctica is Chile\u201d stunt), I got the impression that straightforward ideological faith wasn\u2019t 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 \u2013 which is to say, his artistic values influenced his politics rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t unheard of for right-wing figures to make waves in otherwise forward-thinking art: Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dal\u00ed, even Borges himself. It\u2019s hard to make sweeping generalizations about such figures, but they generally seem to see in fascism a bulwark against \u201cdegeneracy,\u201d an elitist tradition that aggrandizes the role of the \u201chigher arts\u201d 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 \u201capolitical\u201d artists who quietly supported brutal regimes (Dal\u00ed and Borges), it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s regime that weren\u2019t meant to be made public. Whether he himself realized that his aesthetic adherence to fascism ultimately ended in its implicit critique is uncertain.<\/p>\n
What do others think of the distinction between \u201cfascist art\u201d and \u201cartistic fascism\u201d? Which side do you think Wieder falls on?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s clearly another book that the shadow of Borges looms large over, both as an influence and a foil. Bola\u00f1o has a similar way of writing to Borges, full of literary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95306,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[43,11,44,40,41,34],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bolano","tag-bolano","tag-borges","tag-fascism","tag-literature","tag-politics","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ochernikspan312c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}