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While the face off between Alberto and the Colonel is not, strictly speaking, about publishing (it is rather about seeking the truth concerning Arana’s death), the circulation of the young man’s spicy writing is at the core of the discussion. Even though the Colonel argues that the novelettes are “extremely painful” and a “blatant insult,” he is not really concerned about them. Rather, he uses Alberto’s novelettes to discredit the claim that Jaguar assassinated Arana by insinuating that it is just another of Alberto’s “many fictions” or “fantasies”: “Las anécdotas son muy interesantes. Las hipotésis nos muestran que usted tiene un espíritu creador, una imaginación cautivante” (La ciudad 326) [“Your anecdotes are very interesting, and your theories show that you have a creative spirit, a captivating imagination” (Time 336)]. So the Colonel decrees the suppression of these “fantasies,” and allows Alberto to remain in the barracks, but as a now silenced writer. While they do silence Alberto as a writer, the Colonel’s censorial powers point to the fact that in the literary market of the Leoncio Prado there is some room for negotiation with the censorship authorities . It is in this sense that La ciudad y los perros offers a commentary on literary production, distribution, and censorship under military rule. As I have indicated, Alberto’s novelettes are first read, exchanged, and integrated into the economy of the military school. It is only later, when, for reasons having nothing to do with literature per se, the author becomes a threat (“a disgrace,” “a degenerate”) to the military system that they are seized. In the novel censorship appears as a postproduction phenomenon; nevertheless, Alberto’s experience of censorship is closely related to the new policies of the last years of the Franco regime, in which production and censorship go hand in hand. The private negotiations between Alberto and the military authorities read like an anticipation of the new censorship practices that, when Vargas Llosa was writing his novel, were ahead for him as well as for his fellow Latin American Boom writers in Franco’s Spain, practices that were to be first exemplified in the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Vargas Llosa, Barral, and Robles Piquer that led to the final approval of La ciudad y los perros. The novel fictionalizes these practices and the oppositionality they permitted as it reflects on how writers in the barracks find themselves subdued and controlled by a kind of negotiated censorship that fosters production, to the point of positioning sometimes ideology and morals as secondary concerns. 2. THE MARKETING OF MILITARY LITERATURE Ten years after the international release of La ciudad y los perros, Pantaleón y las visitadoras appeared on the Spanish book market and 58 The Censorship Files became yet another of Vargas Llosa’s literary successes. Barral, and the censors for that matter, seemed fully aware that the novel’s depiction of the military would make it an instant international best seller. Many readers were bound to find Pantaleón y las visitadoras irresistible, given that for years this kind of book had been banned from publication in Spain. The plot was certainly an enticing one: the Peruvian military, concerned with the number of rapes committed by its troops stationed in the jungle, organizes an undercover prostitution ring (“Servicio de Visitadoras,” or in the English version “the Special Service”) to satisfy the sexual needs of its soldiers. The secret mission is carried out almost to perfection by the military’s most able and methodical captain, Pantaleón Pantoja, whose brilliant organizational skills lead him to run what turns out to be one of the most accomplished outfits in Peruvian military history. To see a novel so risqué (or at least, so sexually explicit) on display at El Corte Inglés probably surprised many shoppers and potential readers who had themselves been living under the conditions of military-style moral censorship for years. Why did the Spanish censorship authorities allow its publication? Why didn’t they object to the novel’s sexual explicitness and its overt linking of the military to prostitution? The short answer to these questions is that while the censors did raise some of the objections one would expect, their superiors, more concerned with the profits to be derived from what appeared likely to be a best-selling novel, allowed its publication in record time. The long answer has to do with the publishing career of Vargas Llosa in Spain...

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