“A Person Not In The Story”: Clérambault’s And M. R. James’s Textile/Textual Folds

Abstract Though unrelated when it comes to their scientific occupations, Clérambault and M. R. James give to the 21st-century observer the impression that they were strikingly similar in their compulsive preoccupation with draped bodies or with what Gilles Deleuze names “the Fold”. The article investigates the manner in which the French psychiatrist exploited his passion in the innumerable photographs he took in Morocco and in which the English philologist exorcised his fear in fiction, especially in one of his best-known short stories, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.