WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

dream, being time itself, could only be snatched before it passes. Feeling the dream of time flee
from him, the king immediately tries to snatch it from without by grasping it with the figural arm
of the law. Nevertheless, the grasp of the king’s mind, like that of a hand failing to catch
something mid-flight, fails to arrest the moment. The biblical narrative implies this in two ways:
literally, it has Nebuchadnezzar fail to remember his dream while being confused; figuratively,
the king’s command merely causes a movement of air by bringing “arioli” ‘soothsayers’
together, who will only confirm his confusion, by trying to use their mouths to say what the king
strictly saw as a vision with his mind’s eye.
Strangely, it is this latter figural meaning that, in Jerome’s translation, develops the real
events of the narrative. According to Jerome, the pagan soothsayers do not fail because they
perform pagan spiritual rites; rather, they fail for the same reasons that, for the biblical translator,
anyone would fail—they cannot speak that which is purely seen; they cannot arrest witnessed
time by merely talking aboug it. In keeping with the dream’s figural connotation, Jerome defines
“arioli” as “people who perform a thing by means of words,” 161 and thus suggests that their
failure to interpret the king’s dream is also the failure of oral interpretation (of the movement of
air). Daniel’s narrative supports his view. Nebuchadnezzar calls his magi not so that they can
interpret what his dream means but “ut indicarent regi somnia sua” ‘so that they indicate the king
his dreams.’ Jerome’s Latin operates visually in a double register using “indicare” as ‘indicate
and sign’ but also “in-dicare” as ‘in-say,’ to speak from within. The king’s demand is not so
much that of hearing an interpretation but of holding the dream vision which passed from within.
Nebuchadnezzar’s request, in asking the magi to say an exact replica of the king’s dream,
is impossible because what the king dreamt was, first and foremost, a vision and outside the
realm of spoken utterance. As Jerome’s commentary reminds us, “There remained in the king’s
161 Ibid. 24.
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