The Problem of Voice in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Francisco Lombardi's film adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service fails to realize, or interestingly re imagine, the crucial aesthetic/formal treatment of voice in the novel. The novel is heteroglossic and, through its inclusion of multiple styles (military reports, telescopic dialogue, epistolary, and more) it achieves what Robert Stam would refer to as "multi-trackness". Stam uses this term in his essay to differentiate between novels and film--the novel has one plain whereas film can place its different tracks (sound,visual,etc.) in dialogue with each other. However, within Llosa's novel, different perspectives disjoint and coalesce the narrative giving it a richness of voices and views. Lombardi's film does not do this. This scenario is a reversal of Stam's theoretical frame. In this case the novel not the film makes use of multi-trackness. The only attempt at mimicking the novel's use of voice is a voice-over track wherein Pantoja reads military reports he has written. As Michael Chanan points out in his introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment a voice-over narration as a replacement of first person narration is hardly interchangeable. It fails to achieve the closeness to the character and source. In essence the adaptation fails because, beyond this voice-over, it makes no attempt to capture or adapt the skill and intrigue of the experimentation with multiple voices.

The success of the humor in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is directly related to the disunion between the subjects discussed (primarily the discussion of prostitution and sexuality) and the tone of the language the characters use to relate to these subjects. Specifically, the language used by the novel's protagonist Captain Pantoja in his military dispatches on or relating to the establishment of a Special Service of prostitutes. The language of the military is based on numbers, facts, planning, clarity, and politeness. Pantoja's dispatches to his commanding officers--presented in the novel in an epistolary style--demonstrate the hilarious inability for military language to comprehend or examine sexuality. The most clear example is Pantoja's detailed research and description of the establishment of the Special Service. His various investigations (all presented in the crisp language of the military) accounts for the logistics of a bordello, the amount of soldiers/services required, but completely forgets about the menstruation of the prostitutes in the army's employ. This disunion is mirrored elsewhere in the novel. The telescopic dialogue cuts back and forth between different scenes, the setting of the city vs. the setting of the jungle, all parallel the disunion of the language. Llosa's skill lies in being able to make this impossible reconciliation hilarious and not tragic.

Efficiency in Adaptation

One of the most prominent decisions in Hector Babenco's film adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman is the choice to use the fictional Nazi propaganda as the only full film-story that Molina tells to Valentin. This choice does not seem to be solely based on the limitations of time set by feature films as apposed to novels. It would seem Babenco and Schrader (the screenwriter) picked this film over the others in the novel because it does the most. This film, in the novel, serves as a frame for the development of Molina and Valentin's characters. It pulls the most weight when it comes to the surrounding narrative. From the character's reactions to this particular film we learn a great deal about their views of the world.

Molina only sees the Hollywood romance of the picture. All he sees is the starlet singer in soft focus and muted lights and her wonderfully tragic love-- he is oblivious, or at the very least uninterested, in the Nazi propaganda that permeates the film.

Conversely we learn that Valentin cannot see this romance and only sees the politics. He is strangely infuriated by Molina's love of the film. He cannot comprehend how Molina can ignore the film's dark fascist overtones.

Both characters take sides around this film and therefore it does a great deal to shape their individual persona. It is perhaps a matter of efficiency selecting this particular film out of the many described in the novel.

“And I don’t know exactly what happens then.”

The key stylistic feature of Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman is its intense meta fictionality. That is to say: central to Puig’s novel is the stylistic awareness to how the story is told. There are two characters in a prison cell that take the entire burden of moving the narrative forward through, for the most part, dialogue. In addition to moving forward their own story one of the characters entertains the other with bedtime story versions of films he has seen. Can we read this as a sort of meta fictional adaptation?

Molina, the character who tells the film-stories within the novel, “embroiders” the details of the movies. He retelling of the films are essentially decorated “mechanisms” of the actual narratives. “Mechanism” is the term Bertolucci used in his explanation of his adaptation of Borges’ short-story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”. In examining the original work in relation to Bertolucci’s adaptation we can define the mechanism of a story as its essential narrative workings.

Molina recounts the mechanisms of the films with fidelity but the embroideries and the affect of Valentin’s commentary intersecting with the retelling calls for us to read these as miniature adaptations. Framing the mini adaptations within a novel further defends a case that these retellings of films are trans-genre adaptations.

Perspectives of Adaptation

One of the key issues in Michael Chanan’s introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment (film script) & Inconsolable Memories (source novella) is the question of the adaptation of perspective from written work to film.
Desones’ novella is an extremely close first-person work. The aesthetic of the perspective of the novella is inextricably linked to the play with first person language and a metafictional attention to the act of the protagonist writing. These elements are scribal; they require the written word to be effective. Chanan strives to point out how Alea reconciles this problematic in his film adaptation, first by demonstrating the failure of film as a first-person genre, and consequently by showing us Alea’s solution. He writes
“How can you translate the first person of the narrator to the screen as more than a conceit? The convention of a voice on the soundtrack is logically not the same; in film, there is no true equivalent of the first-person narrator in literature, for the camera as an analogue of the writers pen is impersonal: it cannot say “I”; it always says “there is,” “here is”.
Alea’s answer is not to alleviate but to intensify this difference by incorporating documentary footage in which this evidential quality is foregrounded.“ (4)
Chanan sees, in Alea’s solution to the failure of film as a first-person form, an idea worth considering when judging the “success” of any adaptation. When Chanan calls the first person narrator of a film “a conceit” he is establishing the notion that any imitation of technical elements of literature in film are extended metaphorical representations of their sources. They are abstracted representations the of author’s play with complex tropes of a form. In this sense, a bad adaptation, for Chanan and presumably Alea, attempts to represent the tropes of its source material rather than interpret or enter into dialogue with them.
Alea is interpreting this first-person problematic by exploiting the fact that it cannot be achieved. The inclusion of documentary footage is in many ways a polar opposite of the first person journal style of Desones’ novella. It is impossible, however, to believe that Alea is simply ignoring the personal-ness of the original text. The change in title, as Chanan also points out, from novella to film is a distinctly private to public switch respectively. (3) Alea, instead of in vain attempting to re-created the personal, private language and lens of the novella, “intensifies” the breach in the language of the two different forms.
In doing so he is, in essence, mirroring Desones’ highly metafictional style without mimicking it.

Borges and Bertolucci

Borges' sketch "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" is a work that is prime for adaptation. When one reads it through the lens of adaptation theory--particularly Robert Stam's "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation"--the Borges work reads like a sort of narrative blue-print.

The story begins with Borges creating an amorphous setting for his narrative. He writes "The action takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country: Poland, Ireland, the Venetian Republic, some South American or Balkan state...". Though the narrator eventually decides to set the work in Ireland, the naming of various other localities at the onset of the work already demonstrates that "the mechanism" (as Bertolucci puts it) of the work more crucial than its details.

Bertolucci does not specifically clarify for us what he means by "mechanism" but in this context, and the context of his adaptation of the Borges work, the mechanism could be considered the over arcing narrative. For Bertolucci this is a "young man [who] is pursuing [...] a kind of voyage thorugh atavistic memory, through the precociousness" (52)

Stam's essay on adaptation opens with a critique of critics and readers who search for fidelity in adapted works. He writes that it is "questionable whether strict fidelity is even possible". Borges' loose sketch, as well as Bertolucci's interpretation of it, seem to ignore the idea of fidelity in the details of narrative and be concerned with the interpretation of the deeper themes.

Inherent Adaptability--Writing Seeing

Of the many propositions put forth by Robert Stam in his “The Diaologics of Adaptation” the most compelling for me is the sense of inherent adaptability in both the film and novel form. The idea that “[b]oth novel and film consistently canibaliz[e] other genres and media” (Stam 61) already establishes a certain level of adaptation in original works within cinema and literature.
Reading Cortazar’s short –story “Blow-up” through this lens of inherent adaptability created by Stam allows one to see a hidden layer of genius in the work. The hyper-metafictonality of “Blow-Up”—which first manifests itself in the form of confused and shifting perspective—is the first evidence that Cortazar is ready to experiment with his mode of expression. Later the reader experiences a “cannibalization” of genre in the story when our perspective is framed through the lens of the protagonist’s camera:

"I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not includes them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythemed by movement but which a stiff image destroys[…]" (Cortazar 5)

The language here—focus, rhythm of movement—are perspective tools that are fundamental to film and photography but are rarely used in literature. Cortazar’s work is essentially an adaptation. He weaves various structures and discourses within the literature form in order to capture elements of the story which the visual of representative letters on a page seem impossible of doing. These visual cues draw our attention to the failure of his form as well as establishing its infinite ability to adapt different generic tropes.