The Invisible Man Read online

  It is in Chapters V and VI of The Invisible Man that Wells refers most explicitly to the table-rapping antics of the time. In the former, which reports on a crime committed by the increasingly desperate Griffin, Wells slyly observes that ‘the facts of the burglary at the Vicarage came to us chiefly through the medium of the vicar and his wife’ (p. 25). As this pun indicates, Wells relished the thought of these parochial, practical-minded Anglicans ironically acting as mediums. In the second of these chapters, ‘The Furniture that Went Mad’, the one in which the Invisible Man evicts his landlady from his room by hurling objects at her, she comments in almost self-satisfied tones, as if it confirms her deepest suspicions, ‘I know ’tas sperits. I’ve read in papers of en. Tables and chairs leaping and dancing …’ (p. 28). It seems possible that Wells is here conscious of Karl Marx’s discussion of the ‘mystical character of the commodity’ in the first volume of Capital (1867), probably at second-hand. For in a satirical allusion to the spiritualism of the late 1840s Marx had there explained that, once it is defined by ‘exchange-value’ as opposed to ‘use-value’, a table ‘evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will’. This he called ‘commodity fetishism’.14

  Wells had a profound disgust for Marx, whom he castigated in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934) as ‘that stuffy, ego-centred and malicious theorist’. But he did testify to coming ‘full face on Marxism’ as a student in London in the mid-1880s, at a time when his political convictions were by contrast ‘built on the “primitives” of socialism’; and he cannot have remained entirely immune to its ideas and their most recent iterations. He later admitted, in fact, that he had admired Marx for being the first thinker to identify capitalism ‘as a changing and self-destroying order’.15 Although Capital did not appear in English translation until 1887, British socialists had been circulating its ideas, under the guidance of Friedrich Engels, for several years. William Morris, for example, who presided over socialist meetings to which Wells came, read it in the French translation in 1880. Certainly, Wells’s satire of spiritualism in The Invisible Man is at its sharpest when it seems most conscious of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, as when the narrator reports the rumour spreading throughout south-east England of ‘a “fist full of money” (no less) travelling without visible agency’ (p. 61). This simultaneously satirizes both the spiritualization of commodities and the commoditization of spirits at the fin de siècle.

  Wells’s mischievous interest in spirits and spiritualism, more or less inflected by his socialist politics, persists throughout the novel. In Chapter XVII, ‘Dr Kemp’s Visitor’, when the Invisible Man steals into his former acquaintance’s house after escaping from Iping, he leaves behind him the kind of material traces that were eminently familiar to late nineteenth-century readers of the ghost story, one of the most popular genres of the period. Kemp first notices the intrusion of an alien presence in his home when, having conducted his highly respectable scientific pursuits till deep into the night, he crosses the ground floor and perceives ‘a dark spot on the linoleum near the mat at the foot of the stairs’ (p. 69). ‘Apparently some subconscious element was at work’, the narrator comments enigmatically, implicitly ventriloquizing Kemp’s thoughts. On investigating the unsightly spot, Kemp discovers that it has ‘the stickiness and colour of drying blood’ (p. 69). Some of the details of this scene evoke Oscar Wilde’s comic short story ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), in which an exasperated English spectre from a long line of aristocrats tries to use bloodstains, among other stereotypical ghostly devices, to scare off the American bourgeois family that, resolutely unsentimental and unsuperstitious, has snapped up his ancestral mansion.

  Once upstairs, Kemp apprehends that the door handle to his bedroom is bloodstained. And that his bed is wildly disordered: ‘On the counterpane was a mess of blood, and the sheet had been torn’ (p. 69). The atmosphere increasingly recalls contemporary supernatural stories rather more minatory than Wilde’s touching satire, and in this respect Wells’s novel seems closer to ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ (1887) or even The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The light mood has darkened; the romance has become more grotesque. Even more disturbingly, Kemp then suddenly glimpses ‘a coiled and blood-stained bandage of linen rag hanging in mid-air, between him and the washhand-stand’ (p. 69). This obscene, animate thing is like one of those stringy ropes of ectoplasm produced alongside the spirits themselves at an especially productive seance. It is also, more ominously still, like some domestic variant of the unearthly and almost unrepresentable entities that appear in Wells’s contemporaneous science fictions: the ‘moving thing’ with tentacles trailing from it that the Time Traveller encounters at the limits of his journey into the future in The Time Machine (1895); or the Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898), shapeless masses of matter with ‘Gorgon groups of tentacles’ that ‘heaved and pulsated convulsively’.16

  Chapter XVII also evokes those late Victorian variants of the Gothic form that can conveniently be classified as horror stories, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), both published in the same year as The Invisible Man. In Marsh’s novel, Robert Holt narrates how, as an unemployed vagrant, he entered an uninhabited villa in Hammersmith at night in order to sleep in an empty, unlit room he sees from the road, only to apprehend that ‘something strange, something evil’ is invisibly present: ‘I had a horrible persuasion that, though unseeing, I was seen.’17 In Stoker’s novel, according to Keith Williams, as in Wells’s, there are signs ‘of a growing culture of eerily “disembodied” speech, what Lucy Westenra, hearing the call of the vampire, calls “distant voices which seemed close to me” ’.18 The rise of invisible technologies such as the telephone, along with the fashion for paranormal modes of communication like telepathy, created a widespread sense, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the uncanny power of the unseen as a force combining ancient magic and modern science.19

  Finally, in its use of the material traces of an unseen antagonist as clues, ‘Dr Kemp’s Visitor’ leans too on the mechanics of late nineteenth-century crime fiction, as exemplified above all, of course, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which appeared from 1887. And it looks forward, moreover, to early twentieth-century detective fiction — including G. K. Chesterton’s short story entitled ‘The Invisible Man’ (1911), in which Father Brown investigates the predicament of a client who is ‘perpetually being haunted and threatened by an invisible enemy’, an enemy who assumes the form not of a literally but of ‘a mentally invisible man’.20 As this chapter illustrates, Wells’s grotesque romance offers a kind of compendium of populist forms of fiction that are in the ascendance at the fin de siècle.

  Alienation and Identity

  Like the pioneering science fictions that Wells published shortly before and after it, The Invisible Man exploited topical scientific debate as the basis for an enduring myth about the moral and social consequences of those Promethean aspirations that, at both an individual and collective level, were shaping and reshaping industrial capitalist society. In his review in The Bookman, Shorter recognized this when he pointed to the grim ‘pessimism’ permeating its moral claim that, as he put it in deliberately understated tones, ‘scientific experiment never makes the world any better or happier’.21

  In addition to a critique of spiritualism, then, The Invisible Man is a critique of scientism (as the late nineteenth-century conviction that scientific method is the secret to understanding the universe later came to be called). It built in particular on contemporary scientific debates about the invisible inspired by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who accidentally discovered X-rays, sometimes known at this time as the ‘photography of the invisible’, in 1895.22 In The Invisible Man, as one critic has underlined, Griffin ‘acts out the nightmare that X-rays created in the Victorian imagination’, applying it for purely individualistic purposes that quickly become co
llectively destructive.23 To appropriate Marx’s allegorical image of the bourgeois class itself in the nineteenth century, he is like ‘the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells’.24 A descendant of the scientist at the centre of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), then, and a close cousin of both the Time Traveller and Dr Moreau, Wells’s anti-hero is a distinctly ‘Modern Prometheus’.25

  At the moment the Invisible Man first grasps a scientific means of altering the refractive index of his body’s fabric in order to make it completely transparent, he glimpses ‘a magnificent vision of all that Invisibility might mean to a man. The mystery, the power, the freedom’ (p. 83). The Invisible Man’s dream of escaping both the social and technical constraints of his time and the limits of the human form itself, in pursuit of an impossible power and freedom, is of course an ancient one. John Sutherland, who has pointed to the plentiful presence of ‘the invisibility motif’ in popular literature of the nineteenth century, notes that the ‘primeval origins’ of the Invisible Man plot ‘are buried deep in pre-literate myth and infantile fantasies of omnipotence’.26 It is for example a staple feature of fairy tales, such as Jack the Giant Killer, and of Greek legends, including the story of Perseus.

  But as a means of anatomizing power — both its dynamics and its ethics — the invisibility motif also has an ancient literary and philosophical provenance. In composing The Invisible Man, Wells indubitably recalled an important episode in Plato’s Republic, a philosophical work he characterized in retrospect as having acted, when he first encountered it as an adolescent in the early 1880s, as ‘a very releasing book indeed for my mind’.27 In Book 2 of the Republic, Glaucon recounts the legend of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring, in order to argue that, if an individual is suddenly given the gift of invisibility, and is therefore in effect rendered free to act with impunity, he will be unable to resist the temptation to ‘go about among men with the powers of a god’.28 Here, more explicitly than in other ancient versions of the legend, but as in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, the metaphorical value of invisibility pivots on the moral implications of using and abusing power. ‘An Invisible Man is a man of power,’ Griffin states at one point (p. 43).

  But Wells deliberately embedded this Faustian dream of freedom and divine potency in the specific conditions of industrial and metropolitan capitalist society at the end of the nineteenth century. For in attempting to emancipate himself from his physical form, Griffin presses to an apparently utopian extreme the social or spiritual condition that the contemporary German sociologist Georg Simmel, identifying the individual’s attempt to preserve their autonomy ‘in the face of overwhelming social forces’ as the central challenge of ‘modern life’, classified in terms of the ‘intellectualistic’ mentality characteristic of the metropolis.29 Wells had himself faced precisely such an existential challenge when, impoverished and unemployed, he moved to London in 1888 and discovered that his brain was ‘so occupied with the immediate struggle for life, so near to hunger and exposure and so driven by material needs’ that it seemed not to be developing at all.30 In Simmel’s terms, Wells was overwhelmed by social forces and therefore almost forfeited his autonomy. The ‘intellectualistic’ mentality he fostered in response provided both a refuge from this fraught situation and a retreat further into it.

  Later, Wells openly explored the embattled relationship of the metropolis and mental life in Tono-Bungay (1909), whose narrator finds that the most corrosive everyday condition of his alienation is a sense of being universally unnoticed and unseen. For his part, Griffin transmutes the lonely condition of anonymity and invisibility in the streets of the metropolis, as he struggles to maintain his sense of intellectual potential, into something positive, glorifying his nonentity. Almost homeopathically, he transforms his social invisibility into physical invisibility. His powerlessness becomes the source of his power. But if, after successfully conducting his experiment on himself, Griffin briefly experiences a sense of evolutionary superiority over the rest of his species, because he appears almost to have transcended the limitations of his bodily existence, his body promptly takes revenge on him for this attempt to escape its limits. To put it in terms of The Time Machine, the primitive Morlock in him takes revenge on the over-civilized Eloi. Dystopian realities irrupt into his utopian dreams.

  On first leaving the apartment where he has conducted his experiment, Griffin momentarily feels ‘as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind’. Seconds later, though, he realizes that — naked as he is in order not to betray his existence — it might not be so easy to ‘revel in [his] extraordinary advantage’ (p. 92). On the busy streets of central London, his back is jabbed by a heavy basket, his ear grasped by a cabman, and his shoulder blade bruised by the shaft of a hansom cab; finally, his feet are trodden upon by a stream of pedestrians. In the wintry conditions of the capital, he then contracts the first of several persistent colds, which as well as proving debilitating are inconvenient because they reveal his hidden presence to passers-by or, more fatally, those pursuing him. Thereafter, as Simon James points out, Griffin’s ‘dreams of a bodiless existence as pure mental abstraction’ founder on his need for food; and his ‘megalomaniacal plans of world domination are compromised by his simple needs to eat, sleep, and protect himself from the British climate’.31

  In The Invisible Man, Griffin reanimates and personifies a Platonic dream of becoming pure intellect. Wells’s novel therefore dramatizes in tragicomic form its protagonist’s doomed desire to deny that his corporeal frame fatally impedes his intellectual and spiritual ambitions. In striving to escape his body, the Invisible Man imprisons himself in it. On the polluted London streets, he accumulates ‘dirt about [his] ankles, floating smuts and dust upon [his] skin’. Rain and fog, he realizes, will not obscure him as they obscure ordinary people. Rain will make him ‘a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man — a bubble’. More devastatingly still, he intuits that ‘I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity’ (p. 101). He is a mere silhouette of a man; as empty, insubstantial, and vulnerable as an oily bubble of air.

  The Invisible Man is therefore a cautionary tale about the fatal dialectic of, on the one hand, intellectual and spiritual aspiration, and, on the other, social and psychological alienation, that makes and unmakes modern human identity. In this sense, the short fictions that it most closely resembles are not so much Wells’s recent scientific romances as the celebrated, near-mythical accounts of the crisis or collapse of the bourgeois ego published at the fin de siècle by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad — respectively Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Heart of Darkness (1899). For the metaphor of an Invisible Man proves an extremely potent one for reconstructing the acutely alienated, overdeveloped states of consciousness that interested Wells’s contemporaries.

  In Stevenson’s novel, for example, it is Dr Jekyll’s excessive faith in ‘the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired’ that, in a tragic irony, ends up affirming, in the form of Mr Hyde, the beastly materiality of his body. A decade later, it is as a result of this same antinomy that Griffin dramatically ‘cut[s] himself off from his kind’ (p. 114). Wells, indeed, appears deliberately to allude to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in The Invisible Man. The scene in the latter where ‘a little child playing near Kemp’s gateway [is] violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle [is] broken’ (p. 115), irresistibly recalls the one in the former where Hyde, who is stumping along a street, callously collides with ‘a girl of maybe eight or ten’ and tramples calmly over her body: ‘It wasn’t like a man.’32 There is no more indisputable proof of the inhumanity of either of these monstrous men than their vindictively violent treatment of these anonymous children. The Invisible Man brilliantly captures the experience of becoming-inhuman, as it might be called, which
is a consequence, as in the case of Dr Jekyll, of simultaneously aspiring to a condition that is more than human and lapsing into one that is less than human.

  If Griffin hopes that by becoming invisible he will transform himself from a nobody into a somebody, he ultimately realizes that he has merely transformed himself into a ‘nothingness’ (p. 33). As both his correspondence and his fiction indicates, Wells’s friend Conrad instinctively grasped that The Invisible Man was about the competing impulses that, in both reaching beyond the body and relentlessly relapsing into it, tear apart the subject at the turn of the twentieth century. Two of his most terrifying creations are genetically related to Griffin: the terroristic Professor in The Secret Agent (1907) — a novel he dedicated to Wells — who was probably based on Griffin; and Kurtz. The horrifying character at the centre of Heart of Darkness is, according to Marlow, one of those rare, remarkable men who, ‘hollow at the core’, have stepped over ‘the threshold of the invisible’.33 In spite of The Invisible Man’s initially light, playful tone, its narrative too finally derives its force from an apprehension of the emptiness and horror at the heart of the individual subject’s sense of self. Paradoxically, it is precisely in its refusal to reproduce the intricate operations of consciousness, in contrast to contemporaneous novels by Henry James and others, that it mimes so effectively the crisis of interiority that was such a significant feature of the fin de siècle.

  From the perspective afforded by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel’s forensic concerns with what might be characterized as the case of the disappearing subject, the Invisible Man is one of those whom T. S. Eliot subsequently characterized as Hollow Men.34 In Eliot’s poem of that name — which takes the first of its epigraphs, ‘Mistah Kurtz — he dead’, from Heart of Darkness — he delineates this condition of desolation in these despairing tones: ‘Shape without form, shade without colour, | Paralysed force, gesture without motion.’35 The Hollow Man, Eliot’s archetype of emptiness, has in existential terms lowered his refractive index to the zero degree.