SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “Huysmans's Against the Grain: The Willed Exile of the Introverted Decadent.” In Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences—A Jungian Approach, pp. 75-92. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Knapp discusses Joris-Karl Huysmans' controversial novel Against the Grain, suggesting that des Esseintes's self-imposed exile attests to his being deprived of love in childhood, resulting in his present inability to love.

Willed exile and the deepest condition of introversion was the way chosen by Duke Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans's¹ extraordinary novel Against the Grain (1884). Inability to face reality, uncontrollable ennui, and hatred fo a society he saw as superficial, banal, vulgar, and materialistic: all motivated des Esseintes's withdrawal from the world and seclusion in a country home not far from Paris. Alienated from his fellow beings, Huysmans's antihero hoped that by cutting himself from the intellectual, spiritual...