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

164Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsdo not contribute to each other, they war and invalidate each other – thestylistic surface of The Exorcist is fragmented and heterogeneous. The clearcutidentities and domains separated by distinct borders are threatened; theWord of God is replaced by demonic textuality, a chaotic play of variouscompeting discourses with no stable foundation. To quote Kristeva again, ina world “in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task – a descent intothe foundations of the symbolic construct – amounts to retracing the fragilelimits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’constituted by primal repression.” 73 The section titled “The Abyss” concludesas Karras is faced with another handwriting. On the chest of the unconscious,restrained Regan letters appear – a “bas-relief script rising in clearletters of blood-red skin.”Two words:help me“That’s her handwriting,” whispered Sharon. 74This “bodily writing” is intimately connected with the mother-child relationship;after all, Karras’s own inarticulate, sick mother had been desperatelytrying to write to him. At the bottom of the Abyss Karras faces thedemonic Other, only to find the repressed body – the body taking the figureof a child in need of love and protection. After reading the message, the firstthing the next morning, Karras proceeds and asks for permission to seek anexorcism.FACING THE DEMONIC RIFTThe open confrontation that occupies the remaining part of the novel basicallyjust affirms the intuition reached at the end of the confirmation phase.The fourth part, “And let my cry come unto thee…,” describes the actualexorcism. It is the culmination of The Exorcist as a religious work; it is characteristicof the demonic conflicts operating in it, that the ritual actuallyfails. The end of the novel tries hard to make Father Karras a Christ-likefigure and hero of faith. When Karras’s friend, Father Dyer, ponders onwhat he last saw in the eyes of the dying man, he remembers “a look of joy”– “a deep and fiercely shining glint of … triumph?” 75 The value of priesthoodis reconfirmed; the healed Regan looks at his round Roman collar andimpulsively kisses the priest. The fact is, nevertheless, that the exorcismwent wrong precisely in the way Karras feared it would: both of the exorcisingpriests ended up dead, Father Merrin after heart attack, Father Karras73Kristeva 1980/1982, 18.74 E, 277.75E, 339.