Surrealism and the Gothic by Neil Matheson

Author:Neil Matheson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

curious, somewhat hagiographic biography produced in 1942 by Elizabeth Renard as her medical thesis. Renard counters the implication of homosexuality by producing what is surely an absurdly improbable anecdote of Clérambault in Morocco, enjoying a sexual dalliance with two sisters who are so impressed with his performance that they also bring along a cousin.118 In fact, all of the evidence suggests a decidedly austere, authoritarian figure – as Renard herself observes, Clérambault was a very ‘difficult’ character who would refer to himself as ‘the old paranoiac’ and who had a ‘horror of marriage’.119 Renard’s account is dismissed – surely rightly – by Rubens, as a ‘risible portrait’ of Clérambault, and who instead detects there ‘a real hatred of women’, detailing the alienist’s abuse of his patients.120 Rubens cites a revealing interview with Paul Sivadon, who joined Clérambault as a young intern in 1930, and who refers to him as ‘an impossible personality who’s perhaps a pervert’, adding that there was with him ‘a sadistic element that one frequently encountered in the homosexuality clinic’.121 Wilhelm Stekel, writing in 1930, again reflects the attitudes of the period when he argues that all fetishism is ‘a retreat from the female, flight from woman’, claiming that ‘homosexual fetishism’ is ‘the end in every case of fetishism’.122 Stekel writes that the ‘true fetish lover dispenses with the sexual partner and gratifies himself with a symbol’, a symbol that might assume the form of an object or a piece of clothing, characterising such fetishism in terms of ‘obsessional neurosis’.123 Articles of clothing are particularly privileged as fetish objects by Stekel, who argues that: ‘the draping permits the phantasy to increase the voluptuousness of the draped object many fold’.124 Moreover, Stekel notes an element of repetition compulsion in all of this, observing that: ‘There is in all fetishism a tendency to the formation of series and a sort of harem’.125 Clearly a complex personality, Clérambault’s health and eyesight had deteriorated considerably during his final months, resulting in a severe depression that found its focus in the delusion that he had defrauded someone in the purchase of a painting.

Clérambault’s suicide created a sensation in the newspapers, touching a popular nerve of resentment against those who ‘arbitrarily’ deprived people of their liberty, and seeming to provide an ironic revenge in the idea of the alienist who himself goes mad. The entire affair, with its mix of insanity, sexual perversion and suicide was at the time perceived in terms of the purely grand-guignolesque, with one report likening it to ‘an account in the manner of Edgar Poe, three Acts for the Grand-Guignol’, thus returning the genre to its origins in the faits divers columns of the newspapers.126 In its wake the press resurrected the ‘Daltour Affair’, in which a man reported to the police by his landlord as ‘a dangerous madman’ had been handed over to Clérambault for observation at the Infirmerie spéciale. A friend who visited him there found him ‘locked up in a narrow and revolting cell, situated over a water closet’ and berated Clérambault as a ‘torturer doctor’.

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