Even in Lotario's compilation, however, Cervantes's narrative strategy cannot be taken at face value. There are hidden innuendoes in the exchange between the two men, as we shall see, and it taxes the reader's credulity to hear the speech uttered by someone whose subsequent actions belie the principles of chastity, honor, and friendship it espouses so eloquently.

Nancy Miller uses the phrase in her discussion of what constitutes feminist difference in «Getting Personal», 117.

I appropriate here Sandra Cypess's description of how power relations work in Rosario Castellanos's Balún Canán in her «Balún Canán: A Model Demonstration of Discourse as Power», 10.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that «the core of our being consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding... of the preconscious» (V. 603); and Lacan explains: «Something becomes an object in desire when it takes the place of what by its very nature remains concealed from the subject» («Desire and the Interpretation», 28: emphasis mine).

The narrator tells us that if Anselmo had known «que el casarse había de ser parte para no comunicalle como solía, que jamás lo hubiera hecho» (400).

Throughout his work, but especially in Seminar XI, in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (204ff), Lacan appropriates Aristophanes's myth of primordial wholeness (Plato, The Symposium) to posit separation and fragmentation as the originary lack, and the need to recover primordial wholeness as the psyche's unceasing quest.

Brooks points out that «unconscious desire has its own history, its version of an unsatisfactory past and what would give it satisfaction, a history unavailable to the conscious subject but persistently repeating its thrust and drive in present symbolic formations» (278). I would add that connotative slippages problematize the text in a two-fold manner here. Cervantes demythologizes the social construct of masculinity by «feminizing» Anselmo in the Oedipal scenario (not without perpetuating, however, the «natural» coupling of women with hysteria): «has de considerar que yo padezco ahora la enfermedad que suelen tener algunas mujeres, que se les antoja comer tierra, yeso, carbón y otras cosas peores, aun asquerosas para mirarse, cuanto más para comerse» [(411-412: emphasis mine); see Murillo, n. 22]. He also liberates an implicit homoerotic discourse between the two men which destabilizes El curioso's explicit heterosexual matrix, and continues to subject to doubt facile signifying positions.

Francisco Ayala and I concur on Anselmo's vicarious titillation in the seduction scenes between Lotario and Camila -albeit for different reasons. For me Anselmo is titillated as spectator and actor of Camila's erotic involvement with Lotario. For Ayala, whose premise is that a dormant homosexual desire effects the tension between the two friends, the seduction scenes, are motivated by Anselmo's need to experience «satisfacción vicaria a través de su mujer... para los turbios deseos que hasta entonces había mantenido larvados o, mejor dicho, sublimados en las formas nobles de la camaradería» (304).

For Anselmo as participant / voyeur: Anselmo watches Camila and Lotario through the keyhole of the door (415); and Lotario promises to fulfill his seduction plans as promised if «he [Anselmo] watched carefully» (415).

The double entendre consists of the connotative meaning of posesión as both «possession» and «reputation».