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

214Demonic Texts and Textual Demonstor sways between the traditional Faustian figure of magician and the nascentrole of modern experimental scientist, but the latter grows dominant. 44As Jeffrey Burton Russell has noted, “the monster is no medieval demon orspecter but a material being of flesh and blood manufactured in a laboratory.”45 The demonic features are, however, not just trivial residues from anearlier period. The creature is a “monster,” and that connects it with the traditionand significances of monstrosity, especially in this being’s overt heterogeneity.The impurity and grotesque disunion of its constituent parts, assembledfrom the “dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” 46 suggest conflictsand internal discords of selfhood, evoking parallels to the traditionaldemons with horns, tails and other beastly features. The demonic characterisationsof the monster are a very persistent and striking feature of thenovel. 47 This being combines animal and human flesh in its gigantic, scientificallymanufactured body; it is a walking embodiment of heterogeny and apowerful illustration of the conflicts in the early industrial self.Mark Selzer has made many interesting readings or “rewritings” of disciplinaryindividualism and machine culture in his Bodies and Machines(1991). Selzer focuses on the “American body-machine complex” that producesa particular cultural logistics, redrawing of “the uncertain and shiftingline between the natural and the technological.” 48 Frankenstein seems toforeshadow many of the anxieties that figure later in different, sometimesmore subtle forms; the isolation of the emerging “free individual” and theuncertainty about agency. The modern, industrial society is continuouslybeing constructed, and Selzer points out, for example, how agency is underconstruction in literature of adolescence, where the aim is “to make aman.” 49 The emphasis on the naturalness ends constantly in paradoxes, as inthe idea of a “self-made man.” 50 The “natural” and the “cultural” are finallyinseparably intertwined, people constantly defined in terms of complex systemsthey take part in, the agency in modern culture always appearing in theform of a crisis of agency – as “such panic about agency makes for the ritual-44 E.M. Butler’s The Myth of the Magus (1948/1993) is useful in exploring the origins ofthe Faust figure in religious and occult mythology, from the Magi of Persia, Moses andSimon Magus, up to modern times (Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Blavatsky, Rasputin).The historical Faust or interest in devil-worship seems to have contributed less to thelongevity of the myth than the enduring fascination with supernatural powers and secretknowledge. – For more on the magus and computers, see Davis 1994.45 Russell 1986/1992, 189.46 F, 55.47 The creature is ‘demon’ or ‘demoniacal’ in six cases, the more tragic and classical‘daemon’ sixteen times, threatening ‘fiend’ or ‘fiendish’ forty-one times and clearly ‘devil’or ‘devilish’ thirteen times in the text. (76 occurrences in all; the search was conductedusing the electronic text supplied by the Gutenberg Project, frank13.txt; ftp://uiarchive.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext93/ .)48Seltzer 1992, 4.49 A phrase of Ernest Thompson Seton; quoted ibid., 149.50Ibid., 171.