This week’s novel by Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, was a really fun read! I will say, even though Jon informed us it was a comedy, the book was not at all what I was expecting – but in a good way! The idea of having a “special service” comprised of prostitutes being developed and regulated is comical within itself. As Jon mentioned in the lecture, it takes something that is meant to be so casual and spontaneous and free and makes it so structured and serious. Furthermore, I found it interesting that the main plot of this novel revolved around sex, and that it was released during the sexual revolution, it made me wonder if the rise of sex in popular culture had anything to do with the success of this novel, or if perhaps the political climate in Latin American countries contributed to its success, because as Jon said, sometimes dark humour can bring comfort to people in times of dishevel.

One thing that crossed my mind while reading was the idea of “progress traps” which I learned about in a geography class. A progress trap is defined on Wikipedia as “the condition human societies experience when, in pursuing progress through human ingenuity, they inadvertently introduce problems that they do not have the resources or the political will to solve for fear of short-term losses in status, stability or quality of life.” Although progress traps are generally larger scale, I did find that Pantoja’s special service somewhat felt like a progress trap to me. The fact that this mission, so to say, was developed with the intention of having positive outcomes by simply just satisfying the sexual needs of soldiers ended up having negative results and even leading to some death. Although the idea of progress traps did not gain attention until the mid 2000’s, I wonder if Vargas Llosa had an idea like this in mind while writing this novel. It felt to me as though an underlying theme of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service was the consequences of indulging in our desires. Captain Pantoja ended up becoming so obsessed with his mission, although he was so against it at first, that it ended up being his downfall. At the end of the novel, we see Captain Pantoja in a no better position than he started off in, despite devoting much time and effort to his special service.

My question for the reading this week is do you think that there would have been a way for the military to regulate sexual interactions besides the special service? Or do you think that the idea of regulating desires, especially in isolated (jungle) conditions will always be set up to fail from the start?