WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

To do these two things, Ayala’s readers, following the advice of the exemplum, must
remove the experience of continuous time from their pathos of reality. They must draw their
connectedness to the narrative and its universal import without thinking that these events were
possible because of the flow of history. In essence, they must imagine another way of narrating
events without temporal continuity. To give the authority of truth to his speculum, Ayala
addresses the time he lives in (when Benaharin calls the nobles sinners, he ironically uses
rhetoric used by Enrique against Pedro), but he also makes it true by deploying general
diachronic tropes to make his advice authorial (Benaharin must be a Moor writing a letter
because specula in Castile had Arabic epistolary origins). In a way, Ayala’s exemplum tells its
readers that Pedro’s fall happened by necessity but that its necessity occurred independently
from the historical particularities surrounding his fall. Or like the short fable implies, the
shepherd becomes a wolf—the king becomes a tyrant—by eating his lamb in narrative time and
not outside of it.
This logic allows a reader to empathize with kings, shepherds, wolves, and sheep outside
the pathos of chronological time. It allows Ayala’s readers to use signifiers without being part of
their history of signification; it gives them the ability to comment on an event without being
made complicit with its past. Thus, a Trastamaran partisan, like Ayala, can call himself an active
sinner against king and country while at the same time producing a history that would justify his
own treason against Pedro because he does not see his sins against the Crown as occurring in
history. Under exemplary license, partisan history can be “objectively narrated” not as the
uncritical projection of a point of view into the world, but as the critical divorcing of these
experiences from the temporal flow that ties them together in the real world, making a reader
apathetic to their temporal presentation—as an ongoing linear mimicry of his experience of
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