Lullaby: Births, Deaths and Narratives of Hope

Rebekah Pryor

doi:10.3390/rel11030138

Abstract

Guided by the hopeful possibilities of birth, breath and beginning that Hannah Arendt and Luce Irigaray variously articulate, this paper examines the lullaby as an expressive form that emerges (in a variety of contexts as distinct as medieval Christendom and contemporary art) as narrative between natality and mortality. With narrative understood as praxis according to Arendt’s schema, and articulated in what Irigaray might designate as an interval between two different sexuate subjects, the lullaby (and the voice that sings it) is found to be a telling of what it is to be human, and a hopeful reminder of our capacity both for self-affection and -preservation, and for meeting and nurturing others in their difference.

Highlights

There is, in the gap between birth and death, a story to be told.According to Hannah Arendt, our articulation and sharing of narrative about this interval of time constitutes our humanness and differentiates us from other forms of life
Evoking Aristotle, Arendt goes further to emphasize the political nature of narrative: the praxis of narrative, where praxis is understood as action—that most agential and potentially destabilizing political gesture—necessarily couched between other elementary activities of living, namely philosophy and creativity
In a world paralysed by cycles of growth and decay, that most hopeful event of new birth, along with the life and stories we produce and share through breath, remind us that we are “ human”

Summary

Introduction

According to Hannah Arendt, our articulation and sharing of narrative about this interval of time constitutes our humanness and differentiates us from other forms of life. Contemporary art practice constitutes one such praxical mode of inquiry and expression. Pushing beyond genealogies and inheritances of the mother in Western Christian art (by which she has too long been cast as quiet, empty vessel, brimming with life only by relation to Father and Son), I wanted to render the maternal body as one with agency, already in the habit of productive action and capable of speech. This paper draws on my creative, practice-led doctoral research, titled This Is My Body: Re-imagining the mother and the sacred in art and ordinary life, and completed at The University of Melbourne, Australia in 2017. With reference to the lullaby’s etymology and occurrence in late medieval Christendom and ordinary life, I consider the significance of the singing voice in contemporary art (including my own) and, in helping us to begin (and begin again) to speak, listen and think about hope

Lullaby

Cradle Songs and Carols

Hope and Natality

The Singing Voice as “Materiality of the Body” in Relation

Conclusions