WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

CHAPTER III
CASTILE: STORIES WITHOUT TRUTH
One and the same work can thus be a great book of history and a fine novel. What is surprising is that this
interlacing of fiction and history in no way undercuts the project of standing-for belonging to history, but instead
helps realize it…ancient historians did not hesitate to place in the mouths of their heroes invented discourses, which
the documents did not guarantee but only made plausible. 227 —Paul Ricoeur.
Porque algunos que se entremeten de escriuir e notar las antiguedades son onbres de poca vergueña e mas les plaze
relatar cosas estrañas e marauillosas que verdaderas e çiertas, creyendo que non sera auida por notable la estoria que
non contare cosas muy grandes e graves de creer ansi que sean mas dignas de maravilla que de fe.
Because some that intervene to write and note ancient deeds are men of little shame, and desire more to relate
strange and wonderful things than true and certain ones, believing that a story would not be had as notorious if it
does not tell of large and hard to believe things so that they would be more worthy of wonder than of faith. 228 —
Fernán Pérez de Guzmán.
To think, as Gower’s Portuguese translators do, that ideas can be divorced from
narratives, that authority can be derived as a narrative act without reference to an ideal meaning,
we must necessarily accept that, even when what we say does not refer to something, what we
mean to say is still communicable. Put in another way, not all stories need to point to concepts to
be understood. The easiest way to think of this, as Paul Ricoeur implies, is to turn to early
historians and see how their “fictional” stories may tell the same type of truth as objective
“empirical” narratives. For example, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán’s “Prologue” to his mid-fifteenth-
century work Generaciones y Semblanzas clearly interlaces the rhetorical styles of “fiction and
history” despite its author’s overt disdain for “maravillas” ‘wonderful stories.’ In writing short
biographical sketches of kings and nobles, Guzmán does not give us the objective “fechos”
‘deeds’ for each character. Rather, he paints each life through the stylized “estorias” ‘tales’ even
as he reminds us of the need to maintain objectivity through “truthful” narration.
Guzmán’s taste for the “fictional” qualities of truth telling is obvious from what he
credits is the narrative style of his histories. Instead of citing the model of biography of Johannes
227
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990) 186.
228
Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y Semblanzas, ed. J. Domínguez Bordona (Madrid: La Lectura, 1924) 4.
141