WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

the shepherd operates in this way…how much more should the king be with his subjects and
naturals.’ By telling us beginning and end, Ayala’s time tells us what real time cannot—and as a
result, it disturbs the expected unfolding of events within a temporal, first-hand chronicle.
In the verisimilar representation of continuous historical time within a chronicle, this
exemplum would always be outside of time. It would always occur as an event but as an event
impossible as historical accident, as the “ventus” ‘the unseen arrival’ of “ventura” ‘chance’
common to the experience of unfolding history. This is because, although the exemplum’s
circumstances merit anecdotal narration, the details within it are dictated by its always-foreseen
moral resolution. In having an explicit universal end, Ayala’s exemplum makes his chronicle fail
to mimic the one thing that a reader assumes when reading a history, the one thing which the act
of reading has in common with the unfolding of chronological time: the unfolding of events as a
constant march without a necessary beginning or end.
It is the universal message—that a king can be a predator—in a chronological setting—in
the likening of Pedro’s failure at ruling—which makes the exemplum un-timely in the fullest
sense of the term: outside of time (universal) and out of its time (ahistorical). And this is un-
timeliness is what makes this clearly fictional narrative universally true. Even granting the innate
indeterminacy of grammar within any narrated story, Ayala’s example directly conveys meaning
vis-à-vis a fixed ideal without subjective appropriation. In the fable, the main thrust of the tale,
“tu cordero levo un lobo,” must always signify ‘a wolf took your lamb’ and not the opposite but
syntactically possible ‘your lamb took a wolf’ because the one thing which makes the exemplum
a-temporal, the moral—that in eating the lamb the shepherd turns into a wolf—depends on the
predatory likeness of a shepherd to a wolf and not to a lamb. Thus, reading is disciplined not to
the content inside the narrative but to its form. True, Ayala’s readers could always reinterpret the
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