Martin Crimp’s Nomadic Voices

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Notes

1. An earlier, shorter version of this article in French appeared in Tropismes 17 (2011). This content, translated into English, is published here with permission from Tropismes.

2. ‘[A] lack of character, an absence, she calls it, doesn’t she, of character’. Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 25.

3. Martin Crimp, Four Imaginary Characters in Martin Crimp: Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. vii–xii (p. viii).

4. The story of The City revolves around the character of a translator who in the end ‘authorises’ all the characters of the play as she may well have invented them all.

5. Martin Crimp, The Treatment (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 1.

6. French psychoanalyst Henri Wallon conceptualised what he called ‘l’épreuve du miroir’ in 1931. Yet it was Lacan who explored the concept further and reconceptualised it into the moment or phase during which, between six and 18 months, a child anticipates her/his physical unity. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique’, in Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–101.

7. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. by Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1.

8. ‘Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.’ See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 91.

9. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 41 (v. 430).

10. See Heiner Zimmermann, ‘Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life’, European Journal of English Studies, 7 (Spring 2003), 69–85 (p. 81).

11. Crimp, Attempts on Her Life, pp. 50–51. Emphasis in original.

12. Crimp explains: ‘[t]he original story is the famous one of the Rattenfänger von Hameln. George and I exchanged lists of possible themes and stories – circled round them for a while – until it was me who returned to one which was, I seem to remember, on George’s very first list. It suited us both, being well-known enough to offer an unbreakable narrative, but also – like a myth – terse and unexplained enough to allow each of us – first me – then George – to intervene in our own particular ways. In fact, in order to have no preconceptions about what the story signifies, I went to the earliest English-language source, which is a brief and entirely neutral ‘digression’ in Richard Verstegen’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605). This is where I discovered the “little hill” of the title’. Ensemble Modern and Martin Crimp, ‘Into the Little Hill: A Work for Stage by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’, Ensemble Modern Newsletter, 23 (2006) <http://www.ensemble-modern.com/en/press/press_archive/interviews/2006/557> [accessed 3 January 2014].

13. Martin Crimp, Into the Little Hill (Paris: L’Arche, 2006), p. 14.

14. Vicky Angelaki writes: ‘We may take the rats to symbolize any ethnic or religious minority, perhaps ghettoized and treated as a risk to general welfare’, in Vicky Angelaki, The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 128.

15. Crimp, Into the Little Hill, p. 8.

16. Ibid., p. 28.

17. The word ‘extimacy’ is here used in the sense Michel Tournier uses it in his Journal extime (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), in clear opposition to the intimate. The ‘extimate’ is also a concept developed by Lacan in 1969. See, among other occurrences, Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 249.

18. Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, L’Avenir du drame (Champ-Vallon: Circé, 1999), p. 130.

19. In Ensemble Modern and Martin Crimp, ‘Into the Little Hill’. In my citation, the titles of the plays have been italicised; in the original version they appear in non-italicised capitals.

20. Guilhem de Cabestanh or Cabestany was a troubadour in the county of Roussillon. According to his legendary vida, he was the lover of his patron’s wife. On discovering this, Raimon de Castel Rossello killed the troubadour and fed his heart to his wife. See Michel Adroher, Les Troubadours roussillonnais (Pézilla-la-Rivière: Publications de l’Olivier, 2012); The Vidas of the Troubadours, ed. and trans. by Margarita Egan (New York: Garland, 1984).

21. Martin Crimp, Written on Skin – Publication du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (Aix-en-Provence: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2012), p. 37.

22. Katie Mitchell, in Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 23. Author’s translation.

23. Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 39.

24. Ibid., p. 55.

25. George Benjamin, in Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 13. Author’s translation.

26. Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’, with an ‘a’ is present in all his philosophy. It is well defined as ‘Le mouvement de différance entre deux différences (avec un a et avec un e) n’appartient ni à la voix, ni à l’écriture au sens courant, et se tient entre les deux’ (‘the movement of differing between two differences (with an a and with an e) belongs neither to the voice, nor to the writing in the usual meaning of the word, and lies between the two’). Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophies (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 5.

27. Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 20. Author’s translation.

28. Mitchell, in Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 22. Author’s translation.

29. Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 39.

30. Danielle Cohen-Levinas, La Voix au-delà du chant: Une fenêtre aux ombres (Paris: Vrin, 2006), p. 15.

31. Crimp, Written on Skin, p. 18. Author’s translation.

32. The impossibility of saying ‘I’ is explicitly stated by Beckett in Not I (1972). On this point, see Dan Katz, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).