ABSTRACT
Perhaps no one among his near contemporaries manifested the energy of Theodore Gericault's figures more powerfully and consistently than Honore de Balzac—born in 1799—in his own characters. Among Honore de Balza's earliest published writings, from the late 1820s, are fictions centring on the question of madness: Adieu, Le colonel Chabert, Louis Lambert. Esquirol himself sometimes regarded madness as a reversion to a primordial, amoral state. For Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, in Foucauldian mode, "Madness was the catalyst that revealed humanity's inmost nature, its darkest truth, the ultimate aim of Gericault's quest." The art historian Stefan Germer, in an unfinished paper of 1999, took up this sense in terms of the uncanny: the uncanniness, for example, of Gericault's paintings of horses, children, and severed limbs. Germer found in them a surplus of signification, a "quality which does not allow itself to become frozen in representation". Gericault's paintings of severed heads are, for Germer, "an ambivalent mixture of destructive and sexual emotions".
