WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

manner of Enrique’s revolutionary discourse—by distancing what we read from what we expect.
In portraying his own difficulties in representing Ayala’s real world and his ideal portrait,
Guzmán embodies the conflict of the Chancellor’s role as a historian caught between Church and
State, between history and propaganda, between a sovereign and his usurper. This intervention
cannot avoid a personal investment of a reader’s position to the object of analysis and so
sympathy for the truth depicted in the act of the depiction itself as if the reader could remember,
through Guzmán’s style, how Ayala lived, wrote, and precariously but successfully negotiated
political exegincies in his quest to “order” a history of Castile. 306
Guzmán’s description engenders sympathy—an immediate relation—towards the way
which Ayala encountered the world by generating apathy or distance through the reader’s
questioning of his form of historical narration. A reader sees in Guzmán’s conflicting statements
about the writing of history, the same type of conflict that Ayala had to deal with under
Trastamaran discourse; he sees the impossibility of depicting truth while dealing with everyday
reality. However, he does so by distancing his immediate readerly experiences from the way he
portrays events. Ayala’s character embodies clerical and political virtues, but because he is an
“abtoridad,” his embodiment only seems like a the stuff of legends; he is said to influence the
past by serving two kings but the details of his influence are glossed over in silence. In the same
way in which Trastamaran discourse separates an idea of authority from its lived reality, no
“witnessed” detail can help us have an idea of who Ayala was.
306 As Robert Folger puts it in exporting the concept of memoria present in Guido’s Historia in Guzmán’s crafting of
semblanza: “it is clear to realize that semblanzas are potentially instrumental in establishing a commemorative copresence
between the subjects of the semblanzas and the readership…The noblemen portrayed in Generaciones are
exclusively acquaintances of the author’s, some of them his relatives. Pérez de Guzmán writes semblanzas on the
occasion of their death, organizing them in the form of a register of concise entries which typically end with an obit
formula. As a matter of fact, Generaciones is an obituary of sorts…The biographical facet of Generaciones, then, is
not, as scholarship has it, the writing of memorable life stories or psychological portraits, but the re-presentation of
important personalities of his times ‘as if they were alive’”(114-115).
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