Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

148Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsacceptance of otherness as an element of the self is contrasted with the matureacceptance of the existence of the unacceptable. The religious self structuringthe psychic drama of The Exorcist is based on the incompatibility ofgood and evil: it is an ethical and existential imperative for such a selfhoodto prohibit good and evil from blending. Any attempt to understand a religiouswork from inside the scientific tradition should hold this in mind:words like “truth” and “knowledge” are thematised differently, and moralvalues (the existence of absolute Good, as well as Evil) are not just argumentsto be proved or disproved – their existence stands as the most fundamentalfoundation of the religious mind. The operation of the demon in TheExorcist can be approached from this starting point.ANXIETIES IN THE MALE GOTHIC“Religious longing” and “potentially disturbing, anti-social drives” bothdrive The Exorcist, and contributing to its tensions. The possession of Regantakes the form of gradually intensifying transgressions and transformations:a pretty eleven-year-old with furry animals and freckles metamorphoses intoa foul-mouthed being with sinister powers and malevolent intelligence. Possessionis in this process connected with adolescence, problems with school,carelessness with one’s clothes, then to awakening sexuality and “adult” language.The biological foundations of a human being are encountered in theform of the body, bodily functions and transformations of the body, as ingrowing up, getting old, and falling sick. The disturbing and “anti-social”dimensions of human existence are confronted and they are given a nameand a voice – or rather, voices, as the demonised otherness is especiallythreatening in its chaotic plurality. In a manner firmly within the Gothictradition, The Exorcist engages in transgressive and potentially subversivedisplays, such as the possessed girl masturbating with a crucifix, in order tore-establish normal order and a religious ideology in the end. This feature ofthe Gothic has been likened to that of pornography: it tends to “buttress adominant, bourgeois, ideology, by vicarious wish fulfilment through fantasiesof incest, rape, murder, parricide, social disorder.” 17 The Exorcist is also aclear example of the Male Gothic tradition, as defined by Anne Williams; ithas multiple points of view, it insists on the supernatural as a “reality” of itsnarrative universe, it has a tragic plot and it focuses on the possessed Regan,on her tortured and mutating female body, as an object observed with a horrified,male eye/I. The daimonic, threatening impulses take the form of afemale demon in the male psyche, as Joseph Andriano has argued. A malereading of this horror fantasy has to be aware of the underlying pursuit ofsymbolic and psychic unity, ask whether it is achieved in the text, and – if itis – at what cost.17Ibid., 175. See also Williams 1995, 106.