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The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 287tural society and metafictional textuality. The radical consequences of thisdislocation and recontextualisation reverberate through the many dimensionsof this work; for example, the figure of the angel becomes a symbol ofa belief in one, immutable truth, whereas the devil is better suited to becomea symbol for the fluid and conflicting postmodern condition.Heterogeneity and ambiguity characterises also the textual identity ofThe Satanic Verses. The ambivalent status of its blasphemous strategies andits emphasis on dissidence and doubt situates Rushdie’s work in the rebelliousand radical tradition of demonic texts. Often controversial, such worksare not designed to offer univocal answers or instruction, as much as to unsettleand disrupt the conventional order of things. The Satanic Verses forcesus to face and experience the painful problems hidden at the limits of ourindividual and collective identities, as demonic elements have done in variouscultures from time immemorial.
The EpilogueIf there are answers to these questions, they will not be lessdialectical than the questions themselves, or than the IdiotQuestioner within us that silently plots all such questions as apragmatic malevolence.– Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 1This century has been a time of radical change; literary demons bear witnessto this change, in the semi-heroic roles they are given to play, and in thechanging attitudes of people towards such monstrous “others.” Yet, the veryfact that demons have survived in our cultural vocabulary and continue toflourish in the postmodern world is a testimony of some permanency. Thereis always potential for conflicts and confusion, feelings of resentmentamong neighbours, or room for self-accusation and inner dissonance. Theproliferation of demonic imagery may capture the anxiety of contemporarylife, but it demonstrates, too, how we are constantly trying to face theseanxieties and express them in constructive ways. We might remember fromhistory that classical Greek culture was not only embodied in an elevatedOlympian edifice, but contained also the pain and madness of the daimonic;it was the Third Reich that tried to eliminate both all “decadent” art and allthe other “impurities” – that otherness which had intermingled in humanstock.The turmoil surrounding The Satanic Verses proves that the demonichas still retained its capacity for shock and outrage, especially if its polyphonicand parodic characteristics are displaced and read from a differentcultural and religious context. The Western audience, however, seems tohave learned how to tolerate demons. The recent examples of texts employingthe supernatural, Satan and demons, are often actually quite humorous.Practical Demonkeeping (1992) by Christopher Moore is a warm and wittytale of Travis, a seminar student who accidentally invokes a powerful demonand spends seventy years trying to send it back to hell. This “comedy ofhorrors” is packed with details that affectionately connect with the experienceof a generation that has grown into adulthood with modern horror asone important element in our pluralistic worlds: Catch, the demon, irritatesTravis by doing Pazuzu-impersonations (“Your mother sucks cocks in he-el[…]. Then he would spin his head around several times for effect”). 2 Or,1 Bloom 1973/1975, 112.2Moore 1992, 22.
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TAMPERE STUDIES INLITERATURE AND TE
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Tampere Studies in Literature and T
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ments, and also such further lines
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IllustrationsCover: “Possessed Re
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The BeginningsAnd Jesus asked him,
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The Beginnings 3mons form an import
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The Beginnings 5negative, demonic a
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1. The Ancestry of the DemonicÑH.
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2. The Demonic in the SelfBut ancie
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3. Unravelling the Demonic TextThe
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PART II
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114Demonic Texts and Textual Demons
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