WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

cannot tell a reader that he will violate the narrative pact of verisimilitude because a reader
would not believe his story as a real event. Guzmán’s notion of history, however, does precisely
that. It voices a known cultural ideal as a principle for narrative creation when it shows the mix
of clerical and political life in an uncertain “legendary” status to what should be a factual
account. Consequently, the portrait’s rhetoric makes the reader question the principle of its
narrative construction by openly using culturally situated ideologies as ways to construe a
supposedly “objective” history.
5. True Events: the Trastamaran Revolution
This is not to say that Guzmán’s Generaciones y Semblanzas merely plays readerly
expectations against one another without prompting its readers to think of the portraits as
historical depiction of events. After all, the people it portrays were known to its readers as
influential to their society and, given the closeness of the Castilian court, may have been vividly
remembered as family members. Further, because Generaciones depicted lives from the recent
past, a reader would have more of an incentive to think of Ayala’s portrait as depicting a “true”
and not a “stylized” access to reality.
In fact, Guzmán makes it clear that the Chancellor’s life had a real effect in the reader’s
culture by contextualizing it with the life of two kings, Pedro I and Enrique II: “Ouo grant lugar
açerca de los reyes en cuyo tienpo fue, ca, seyendo moço, fue bien quisto del rey don Pedro, e,
despues, del rey don Enrique el Segundo fue de su conseio e amado del” ‘He had a great place
close to the kings in whose time he was, that, while being a young man, he was well loved of the
king Don Pedro, and, later, he was of the council of the king Don Enrique the Second and loved
by him.’ 273 This type of contextual dating not only situates Ayala in an “actual” history, but it
introduces the first judgment about Ayala’s character—that he was a man worthy to be loved.
273 Pérez de Guzmán Generaciones 41.
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