WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

importantly, he speaks by means of images. He accomplishes this by thinking the two sides of a
narrative—its literal and figural meanings—as necessarily coterminous. In his interpretation, the
passage of time is not a personified oral speech which bears with it the will of its author but the
still look of an image which awaits a future interpretation in time, which awaits the allowance of
Arioch to bring the prophet before the king, of Nebuchadnezzar to give time for Daniel to dream,
and for God to give Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of time to him in a dream. In fact, the linkage of
temporal deferral and written authority is seen in the very structure of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream
from this point on which is literally interpreted as a statue of many metals that means to
allegorize the passage of history (a still depiction of the passage of time) and is figurally
represented by purely visual Hebrew characters on the page without direct Hebrew ideas (an
arrest of “sermo” ‘speech’ through an image). 170
As a prophecy, Daniel’s literal representation of time as an image (a statue made up of
different metals which represent a prophecy of the growth of the empires of the world and their
end) manages to not monopolize the passage of time through speech but to arrest it in a pictorial
stillness. As a way of writing, Daniel’s figurative embodiment of time through an image (a
written story about a dream contained in the visual play of hollow Hebrew characters) arrests
time while still inhabiting it. As a result, the narrative makes the reader focus not on its ability to
reflect a stable meaning but in its play of resemblances.
In Daniel, biblical writing is therefore the writing of the figural and the literal through
time. Anticipating Jacques Derrida’s idea of écriture, Jerome’s portrayal of the events in Daniel
simultaneously turns writing into the stillness of time and movement of meaning, a deferral and
170 It is important that Hebrew characters continue to represent Aramaic speech up until the last vision which Daniel
saw under the rule of Belshazzar, the king whose rule ended by a disembodied hand writing a strange, unknown
language on the wall.
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