WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

7. Past Truth: Experiencing Time in Ayala’s Corónica del Rey Don Pedro
Guzmán’s portrait immerses the reader in what Ayala must have lived through in the
past by altering how he experiences truth in the present. This means that his writing manipulates
a readerly experience of time. Guzmán’s narrative art parallels the Castilian discourse on
authority following the Trastamaran Revolution because it distances symbolic expectations from
real events, and we can see this discourse at work most clearly in the most popular account of
this event: Pedro López de Ayala’s chronicles of Castile, and in particular, the account of the
Revolution in his Corónica del Rey Don Pedro.
Unlike what its name suggests, López de Ayala’s Corónicas were not united into a
progressive narrative of the Spanish kings from Pedro I to Enrique III. 307 The manuscript
evidence shows that Ayala’s approach to his chronicles was much more episodic, depicting time
periods without thinking of a unified timeline so that the lives of the kings did not act like
chapters in a book but as separate concurrent perspectives of Castile’s history. 308 In this manner,
the chronicles do not always start with a king’s birth or his ascendancy to power. Rather, they
overlap the telling of the rule of a monarch with that of another. For example, Enrique II is
crowned king and referred to as king in the chronicle of Pedro I and not in that of his own
name. 309
Since the Corónicas maintain a personalized description of events, this approach has the
surreal effect of making a limited narrator appear in two places at once. During the height of the
Trastamaran war, Ayala appears to move between warring camps of Pedro and Enrique as if he
was not part of the history which he so personally depicts. The consistent march of time coupled
307 Germán Orduna, El Arte Narrativo y Poetico del Canciller Ayala (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1998) 184.
308 Ibid. 157.
309 Ibid.
183