WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Montiel. Instead, the Chancellor delegates his personal perspective in an exemplum—in a place
in which his viewpoints would retain their authority by being linked to a universal “truths.”
Ayala’s, thus, sets a precedent that Guzmán follows. Just as Ayala distances the personal
view point from the facts he narrated in his exemplum, Guzmán does not see the persona of the
Chancellor present in the temporal unfolding of the Revolution, or rather, he knows Ayala’s
involvement in it, but he recognizes it as a personal silence, as a way in which this exemplary
figure of authority removes his pathos of history from his “truthful” depiction of it. Guzmán
decides to represent Ayala’s life in accord to universal but not experienced truth. The failure of
Ayala to be an exemplary knight or man of letters, then, represents the failure of any personal
narrative to project the experience of lived history. This allows Guzmán’s description of Ayala to
retain an air of verisimilitude without sounding like a legend or a direct witnessing of events.
For Castilian historiographers, apathy is therefore a way of representing reality without
the pathos of the contexts which surround their subjective experience, without the accidents
introduced by the passage of time. Apathy as type of authorial narration at least partly explains
the Trastamaran detachment of the figure of authority—of the representation of sovereignty—
from the ready exercise of his power in reality: the ready use of images in the Trastamaran
propaganda were knowingly impossible for the daily experience of a king’s rule because to some
extent ideal authority did not rely on the living out of its symbolic expectations. Apathy,
however, does not fully explain why historians would seek to separate authority from its
representation in reality—it does not answer why a writer would use stories, tropes, and fables
without trying to evoke a reader’s social context.
As the examples of the very “verisimilar” works of history of Guzmán and Ayala show,
exemplary signs trained a reader in a-temporality, in a way of expecting meaning outside the
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