Hello Blog readers,
This week I read Captain Pantoja And The Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa, and I was not expecting what I just read. To put it blankly, this book was all about sex, yet in such a formal way to disguise the topic. The overall story was interesting, and I really enjoyed Vargas’s writing style, but I have lots to mention about the soldier’s actions, formality, humour, and points of view in the novel.
Starting with the objectification and rape of these women. The soldiers in the army were so horny they could not keep their hands to themselves and were going out and molesting women. The soldiers were violating these women, and the army would say things like, “The army sincerely regrets your sister-in-law’s misfortune and will do what it can to compensate her” (4). The army completely ignored that these soldiers must be punished for their actions instead of assessing the solution as a prostitute service. The soldiers need to know what they did was wrong, but the army believed that this was hurting the army as much as the victims, which we can see with the quote, “Because these abuses do as much damage to the Army as to the victims” (5). The rape even led to “forty-three pregnancies in less than a year” (6), which shows that these actions were getting out of hand. However, the general tried to blame the behaviour on the climate and diet. The soldiers were going crazy, acting like animals, when they would return to the town for the weekends. Even Pantoja fell to the horniness of Iquitos because when he got there, his sex drive increased, and he also got a prostitute to start sleeping with. Overall though, I think the special service was not fixing the root of the problem because we can see that they kept on needing more and more specialists to have adequate servicing for all the men over time. It started off with five specialists to needing over 2000. The lust and demand for these special services were too much, and even the civilians wanted in on the action. For example, the idea of a “washerwoman” going house to house and offering their services to the people of Iquitos was so bizarre to me. Honestly, the army funding prostitutes as an outlet for sexual desire so the soldiers would stop raping the civilians is not an approach I would see being tolerated nowadays, but then again, this book does take place in the 1950s.
The other thing that was so unique about this book was the formality they used around the subject. For example, they would use words like specialist to refer to the prostitutes instead of calling them whores. Another example would be how they referred to sex as a service, but the service is sex. The novel uses all these euphemisms to talk about terms that are typically blunt or harsh. Therefore, throughout the entire novel, this layer of overwhelming professionalism makes it feel more serious than it would otherwise be considered.
Additionally, I really enjoyed the multiple points of view in this book. For example, when Pochita, the wife, would take over a chapter and write a letter to her sister. I would love that because of her humour and writing style. She was so abrupt and to the point, blankly talking about her sex life and her sister’s virginity. The letters she would write would be from a different point of view from the rest of the text and would have lots of jokes. Her writing also was very personal, and it felt like we were on FaceTime or as if we were friends by the way she would go on tangents. Whatever she said as a joke would allow for that release of ambition without the same force. For example, I remember she said something along the lines of I will cut his dick off(ha ha); she said this as a joke, as we can see with the emphasized laughter, so that it wouldn’t have the same force to it. If she were serious and did not show laughter, it would be seen as a bigger deal, but since it was just a joke, it was not taken seriously.
My question this week for you guys is, do you think the sexual desires in this story are over-exaggerated or fall to the truth of what soldiers were like back in the day? Personally, I think since the story was fiction, it does have an extreme amount of lust to make the story more captivating for readers. Also, what was your favourite character in the novel? Mine was either Pochita or Pantoja’s mom.
"Throughout the entire novel, this layer of overwhelming professionalism makes it feel more serious than it would otherwise be considered." Prof. Beasley-Murray commented on this in his lecture, and it seems to me one of the narrative successes of the novel. We could almost say that there is a polyphony of voices, ranging from the most terribly bureaucratic, to gossip or to the journalism of the time, all with the intention of parodying Vargas Llosa. But we must go further. Is this enough to provoke humor? Especially since sexual violence is explicit in several passages.
ReplyDeleteHi Melika,
ReplyDeleteGreat conversation regarding the professionalism and bureaucratic jargon used throughout the book.
Why do you think there is the use of such colourless vocabulary? Of course, it seems as though all government documents are bland, even when discussing quite colourful things. Indeed, it would be a little foolish to have the government creating documents, legally binding and often precedent setting rules, intermixed with emotional and provoking language.
Yet, in Captain Pantoja, I feel like this is taken to the extreme where one is forced to make fun of it, laugh at it. It is frankly hilarious when there may be the sentence "the Specialist, Knockers, accomplished 3 services, spanning an average of 10 minutes per service, with the shortest being only 1.5 minutes," as this, in common terms means, "the sex worker, Knockers, had sex with 3 men, the average time was 10 minutes, and the shortest time was 1.5 minutes, because one guy was so overly anxious to get it on!"
We use euphemism all the time in our vernacular, but Captain Pantoja points at this and ridicules this... Why do we use euphemism? To soften the blow of the real meaning of things... But when you use euphemism, the question you should ask yourself is 'what are you trying to hide from?' Maybe if we could focus on that, analyze that, we as a collective would not have to shy away from uncomfortable topics, and actually work towards wrestling with the truth of the matter.
All the best,
Curtis HR