SOURCE: "Gastro-Exorcism: J. K. Huysmans and the Anatomy of Conversion," in Compromise Formations: Current Directions in Psychoanalytic Criticism, edited by Vera L. Camden, Kent State University Press, 1988, pp. 113-27.

In the following essay, Mossman argues that the neur tic personality of the central character of Against the Grain reveals elements of Huysmans's own psyche that eventually led to his religious conversion to Catholicism.

The Catholic church made a prestigious conversion in the case of J. -K. Huysmans. In his 1903 preface to A rebours (1884), the converted author attempts to explain, as much to himself as to his readers, the curiously monkish tastes of the novel's neurotic hero, des Esseintes, who is nothing if not a dyed-in-the-wool hedonist bent on exploring the limits of sensual experience. Far from repudiating mis earlier product of an "unChristian" phase, as one might have expected him to do, Huysmans maintains that "all the novels...