The "Acoustic Mirror": Reframing the Maternal Voice in the Hebrew Lullaby

Abstract

The "Acoustic Mirror":Reframing the Maternal Voice in the Hebrew Lullaby Lilach Lachman (bio) What leads to sleep has the shape of rhythm, of regularity and repetition. … The only processes that belong to sleep are those of respiration and circulation. … When it goes to sleep, the body is rocked to the rhythm of its heart and lungs. … Rocking movements put us to sleep because sleep in its essence is itself a rocking, not a stable motionless state. Lullaby: one charms, one enchants, one puts mistrust to sleep before putting wakefulness itself to sleep, one gently guides to nowhere—swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. In this meditation on the lullaby, Jean Luc Nancy (2009, pp. 29–30) engages a rhythmic mode of being that departs from the waking self and detaches itself from the "you" and from the world. The "lullaby" that performs the night ritual, within both body and soul, approximates a primal world, measured only by the repeated beat of "respiration and circulation," which puts wakefulness to sleep. Nancy's phenomenological narrative of dropping into an endless pursuit of an imaginary "home" does not sound alien to our ears. Even though we are subjected to the mechanism of social media and at times deprived of biological and cosmic rhythms, many of us have often entered sleep with some sort of lullaby. The "swaying of the world which makes the cradle" on which Nancy reflects may be familiar to us both as (grand) parents and as adults who have been blessed with some kind of early lulling experience. We may note that the dumb rhythmic signals ("respiration and circulation," "cadence," "rocking") mentioned in the above passage are all vocalized by means of the lulling or [End Page 485] lulled voice: swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.1 The voice that is to wrap the sleeper who resists sleep may be attributed either to the one attending them or to the sleeper herself who has interiorized the lull. In her book, The Acoustic Mirror (1988), Kaja Silverman, the cinema and psychoanalytic theorist, conceptualizes the image of the infant held within the sphere of the mother's voice; she clearly genders this primary experience and characterizes it as a "blanket of sound, extending on all sides of the newborn infant" (p. 72). Viewed from the site of the unconscious, this image is commonly considered an emblem of infantile plenitude and bliss. Silverman cites the "sonorous envelope" (Rosolato 1974 and Doane, 1980) that "surrounds and cherishes the child," a "mobile receptacle" that absorbs the infant's "anaclitic facilitations" (Kristeva, 1986), and a "bath of sounds" (Anzieu, 1976) as variants of an overruling trope that turns upon "the image of infantile containment" held within the environment of the mother's voice (Silverman, 1988, p. 73). Vital to Silverman's argument is the assumption that this containing trope grows out of a cultural male fantasy that is evident in both recent psychoanalytic theory and classic cinema. Significantly, Silverman has shifted the theory's center of gravity from Freud's focus on the father and from Jacques Lacan's mirror phase, to the maternal voice.2 The Acoustic Mirror and the Lullaby: Between Paternal and Maternal In parallel to Lacan's (1977) "mirror stage" that entails a "misidentification" that allows the forming of the "imaginary" within the infant's development, Silverman (1988) posits the experience of hearing another voice. This auditory voice echoes, responds, and produces new sounds in the duet played when language begins to form in children's mouths and brains as they start acquiring speech and articulating emotion. Not only does Silverman replace Lacan's emphasis on the visual with the vitality of the oral, but instead of Lacan's emphasis on the absent male phallus, Silverman highlights the role of the maternal voice. On the one hand, by means of voice, the subject enters [End Page 486] language and thereby relinquishes themself; the materialization of voice is accordingly accompanied by phenomenological loss. On the other hand, the birth of desire often enacts an aspiration toward authoring discourse. The maternal voiceover, which Silverman detects in Hollywood films, is often first heard in lullabies. The...