The Invisible Man Read online

  Terror and Tragedy

  There is an irreversible darkening of the mood of The Invisible Man about two-thirds of the way through the narrative, at the precise point at which Griffin, in his doomed attempt to solicit assistance from Kemp, commences in his own voice retrospectively to recount the events that have led to the present, catastrophic situation. From this moment on, when the action shifts for a time from Sussex to central London, its protagonist comes to seem increasingly tragic. When the plot reverts again to the present, and to the increasingly frenzied efforts of the Invisible Man to escape the forces of justice that are closing in on him throughout the countryside, the sense of tragedy deepens. No longer a ‘tragic farce’, as Bernard Bergonzi called it, it is finally a grimly farcical tragedy.36

  There are hints of this tragedy, though, which hinges on Griffin’s horrifying nihilistic condition, long before this. It is intermittent in the more or less comic scenes set in and around the rural communities of south-east England in the first eighteen chapters of The Invisible Man. From the instant Griffin falls ‘out of infinity into Iping village’ a sense of the void, of non-being, intrudes on the ordinary and everyday (p. 14). The appearance of the stranger, whose head is wrapped in white bandages, whose eyes are screened by ‘inscrutable blank glasses’, and whose mouth and jaws are covered by a white cloth, is from the start unsettling as well as ridiculous (p. 7). He is a ‘strange man’, as the title of the opening chapter indicates, as well as a stranger; ‘an unusually strange sort of stranger’ (p. 13). An alien. The local clock-mender, Mr Henfrey, encountering him in the parlour of the pub soon after his appearance in Iping, comments that he is ‘like a lobster’ (p. 10). Mrs Hall, Griffin’s landlady, insists that he looks ‘more like a divin’ ’elmet than a human man!’ (p. 8). That night, moreover, she has a nightmare about ‘huge, white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes’ (p. 13). It is the Invisible Man’s grotesque physical appearance, however absurd in its associations, that conducts the creeping horror that overtakes the book.

  And it is above all the intimations of empty space beneath the Invisible Man’s peculiar surface appearance that prove horrifying. When Mrs Hall delivers a tray of food to Griffin’s bedroom, where he has ensconced himself with his scientific equipment the day after his arrival, she suddenly notices he has absent-mindedly removed his spectacles: ‘they were beside him on the table, and it seemed to her that his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow’ (p. 16). Later that afternoon, the carter Mr Fearenside reports that, when his suspicious dog bit Griffin, for a second he ‘seed through the tear of his trousers and the tear of his glove’. Instead of the pale pink flesh he expected to see, he explains, there was nothing: ‘Just blackness.’ This is a glimpse into Infinity in Iping. Fearenside rationalizes this experience by deciding that, far from being an albino, Griffin is in fact a black man — ‘I tell you he’s as black as my hat.’ Or, on further reflection, that he is ‘a piebald’ or ‘a kind of half-breed’ (p. 18). He does not understand, of course, that the blackness beneath the stranger’s clothing is simply that of blank space (the association of blackness and blankness is subsequently underlined when the narrator describes the Invisible Man as ‘staring more blackly and blankly than ever’ (p. 29).

  Henfrey had himself unconsciously mimed or replicated the emptiness of the Invisible Man’s interior when, in Chapter II, he mended the clock in the parlour where Griffin, mysteriously muffled in his disguise, sat by the fire on taking refuge in the pub. Henfrey, the narrator reports, not only took off the hands and face of the clock, but ‘removed the works’ (p. 12). Is a clock without its face, hands, and works still a clock? Is a man whose face, hands, and body are invisible still a man? This is the metaphysical question that Wells implicitly poses. In the meantime, as Henfrey pretends to tinker with the clock, he looks up at Griffin and is promptly paralysed by the sight of ‘the bandaged head and huge, dark lenses, staring fixedly’ at him: ‘It was so uncanny to Henfrey that for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another’ (p. 12). In a double sense, the Invisible Man has a blank look.

  It is in this chapter that Mrs Hall too first intuits, in addition to his strangeness, the stranger’s monstrous blankness. On entering the parlour in order to warn her guest that the clock-mender is about to interrupt his privacy, she catches Griffin at a moment when, thinking himself alone, he has lowered the white cloth that covers his mouth and chin. The room is dark, her eyes are dazzled by the lamp that she has just lit, and he quickly screens himself again, ‘But for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open, a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face’ (p. 10). This terrifying, self-cannibalizing mouth is a fragment of infinity that instinctively takes a ravenous bite out of the everyday. Like the mouth in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, first painted in 1893, it threatens to contort or warp the world of which it is part.

  A couple of chapters later — in ‘The Unveiling of the Stranger’ — it becomes impossible for the inhabitants of Iping to suppress their glimpse into nothingness. There, exasperated by Mrs Hall’s repeated complaints about his inexplicable activities, he resolves to shock both her and the other local people assembled in the public bar into silence: ‘Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity’ (p. 33). He has removed his false nose. Performing a grotesque striptease, he takes off his disguise item by item — hat, spectacles, false hair, and bandages. ‘They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors — but nothing!’ The residents of Iping scramble to escape. ‘For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation was a solid, gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then — nothingness, no visible thing at all!’ (p. 33). His entire head is a black cavity.

  It is probably in Chapter IX — when, after fleeing Iping, he recruits Marvel to assist him in his attempt physically to survive — that the reader of The Invisible Man starts to perceive Griffin as someone not simply to be feared but also to be pitied. The Invisible Man is still a brutal monomaniac, and he will become more and more homicidally violent in subsequent scenes — not least when he returns to the streets of Iping and, in the form of the ‘raging unseen’, ‘set[s] to smiting and overthrowing for the mere satisfaction of hurting’, like a vengeful Old Testament prophet (p. 53). But he is also a victim. Significantly, the author of the review of The Invisible Man in The Spectator was in no doubt that Griffin ‘is really a tragic figure’.37

  ‘I am just a human being — solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too,’ he appeals to the tramp, who is sitting beside a road on the South Downs, ‘… But I’m invisible’ (p. 42). If his motives for persuading Marvel to help him are in one sense cynically self-seeking, in another they are a matter of the most fundamental human survival. ‘I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent,’ he announces (p. 42). Griffin on the Downs thus echoes Lear on the Heath. In King Lear’s terms, the unaccommodated Invisible Man is ‘the thing itself’, ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’.38 He claims at least that the reason he stopped to communicate with Marvel, when he could have murdered him, is because he felt a sense of solidarity with his rootless condition: ‘ “Here,” I said, “is an out-cast like myself” ’ (p. 43). Both are fugitives from society.

  ‘He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man,’ the narrator later remarks of the Invisible Man (p. 118). In Chapter XX, it is Griffin’s startling lack of sympathy, ironically, that secures the reader’s empathy. His apparently callous account of returning to his former home, his father’s house, in a ‘place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town’, is oddly moving (p. 84). This is a man who, profoundly alienated from the everyday conditions of industrial capitalist society to which he feels condemned, in part because of t
he ‘frightful disadvantages’ under which he must pursue his unorthodox scientific research, is suffering from an acute state of anomie (p. 82). ‘I remember myself as a gaunt, black figure, going along the slippery, shiny side-walk, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place’ (p. 84). This cold-blooded ‘black figure’, whose albino features have been obliterated by the gloom, transforms himself soon after the funeral into an almost bloodless, transparent figure. Ingesting ‘drugs that decolorise blood’, he undergoes a ‘night of racking anguish’ (p. 89). Finally, he informs Kemp, ‘I became insensible, and woke languid in the darkness’ (p. 89). It is an existential alchemy. Griffin’s insensibility, it might be said, is the basis of his invisibility.

  Griffin’s identity as an outcast, which his accommodation in an unfurnished room in a slum on Great Portland Street confirms, is dramatically reconfirmed as soon as he leaves this lodging once he has successfully conducted his experiment on himself. Naked on the muddy roads around Oxford Street, on a freezing cold January day, he first assumes the form of the poor, bare, forked animal that will later implore Marvel for assistance in the Sussex countryside. ‘I was now cruelly chilled,’ he explains to Kemp, ‘and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as I ran’ (p. 93). Leaving the ‘ghost of a foot’ in the mud, he is chased through Bloomsbury, feeling increasingly desperate, by a group of inquisitive boys, before concealing himself in a department store for the night (p. 96). In the metropolis, there is no one to whom he can appeal for help. ‘I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke’ (p. 96). So commences his life on the run, which he reconstructs for Kemp, who begs him not to be ‘a lone wolf’ (p. 111). But Griffin has announced his intention of implementing a Reign of Terror, a ‘brutal dream of a terrorised world’ (p. 115). When he realizes that, even though he has taken his former friend into his confidence, Kemp has betrayed him to the police, he is forced on the run again.

  ‘He is mad,’ Kemp declares, ‘inhuman’ (p. 113). It is Kemp who supervises the manhunt with which the narrative concludes. He directs the police to ‘set a watch on trains and roads and shipping’ (p. 113). And he issues a proclamation that presents the Invisible Man not simply as ‘a legend’ but also ‘as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome’ (p. 115). As the plot accelerates, mounted police enforce a curfew throughout the countryside. In a 20-mile circle around Port Burdock, where Griffin is assumed to be in hiding, groups of ‘men armed with guns and bludgeons’ set out with dogs ‘to beat the roads and fields’ (p. 116). The narrator refers to them as ‘men-hunters’; and he concludes with some compassion that, though Griffin was soon ‘active, powerful, angry and malignant’ again, ‘he was a hunted man’ (p. 118). According to the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, there are two kinds of manhunt, ‘a hunt of pursuit and a hunt of expulsion’, but these distinct operations have a complementary relationship: ‘hunting human beings, tracking them down, often presupposes that they have been previously chased out, expelled, or excluded from a common order’.39 The Invisible Man’s identity as the object of a manhunt that seeks to capture or kill him is predicated on his prior social exclusion — as an albino, as a dissident scientist, and as a sort of man without content.

  For a time, the Invisible Man manages to reverse the apparently implacable logic of the manhunt. He besieges Kemp’s home in an attempt to take revenge on him, then chases him through the countryside on foot. In the end, however, it is Griffin who is entrapped by his pursuers, even though at this point he remains invisible. The final chapter is entitled ‘The Hunter Hunted’. At the climax of the narrative, a ‘heap of struggling men’ consisting of navvies, police constables, and a tram conductor wrestle the invisible form of Griffin to the ground. ‘Kemp clung to him in front like a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands clutched and tore at the unseen.’ Savagely beaten, and bleeding badly from a wound inflicted by a spade, the Invisible Man emits ‘a wild scream of “Mercy, mercy!” that died down swiftly to a sound like choking’ (p. 130). At the culmination of this manhunt, a mob encircles ‘the thing unseen’, which is held fast by its ‘invisible arms’ and ‘invisible ankles’ (p. 130). Griffin’s mouth, which Kemp feels with his groping hands as he kneels beside him, is wet with blood: the Invisible Man is dying.

  Suddenly, an elderly woman screams and points. ‘[F]aint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries, and bones and nerves could be distinguished’, the ‘outline of a hand’ becomes visible to the assembled people. It becomes increasingly ‘clouded and opaque’ (p. 131). Then the rest of the Invisible Man’s body gradually materializes: ‘First came the little white veins, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess and then growing rapidly dense and opaque’ (p. 131). It is an eerie metamorphosis; a coming-to-life in death. The monstrous terrorist who has menaced the nation, as a tyrant both superhuman and subhuman, can finally be seen in his entirety, and in his humanity.

  Griffin really is nothing more than the poor, bare, forked creature he had claimed to be when he first encountered Marvel. ‘When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty.’ Once he has been covered with a sheet, he is lifted from the street and carried into an adjacent pub. ‘And there, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, ended the strange experiment of the Invisible Man’ (p. 131). In his sordidly commonplace experience of dying, this homeless, hunted, battered man is absolutely emblematic of the ordinary humanity he dreamed of transcending. It is to this that Arnold Bennett referred in his review of Wells’s novel in Woman magazine when he remarked that ‘the last few pages are deep tragedy, grotesque but genuine’.40

  The pathos of the painful process of becoming-human described in the final paragraphs of The Invisible Man is reinforced rather than undermined by his anomalous physical appearance: ‘His hair and brow were white — not grey with age but white with the whiteness of albinism’ (p. 131). His albino features signify his status as a social outsider, as they have done throughout the narrative, but at the Invisible Man’s death they are also symbolic of a redemptive purity. Indeed, as his age and his ‘broken body’ indicate, Griffin is implicitly Christlike at the end. ‘Cover his face!’ a nameless man cries out after he has died, in a revealing addition Wells made to the first American and second British editions of The Invisible Man, both published in 1897. The man’s exclamation is an attempt to shield the children present from the horrifying expression of ‘anger and dismay’ that contorts the dead man’s appearance (p. 131); but it also echoes the scene in St Mark’s Gospel when, after his arrest and shortly before his crucifixion, the high priest of the Sanhedrin pronounces Christ guilty and rends his clothes: ‘And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him’ (Mark 14:65). Christ is here performing the ancient role of the scapegoat — the deformed, polluted creature that is sacrificed in order ritually to cleanse and purify the community from which it has been expelled.

  Griffin too performs the tragic role of society’s scapegoat. ‘The whole point of the scapegoat’, Terry Eagleton has insisted, ‘is its anonymity, as a human being emptied of subjectivity and reduced to refuse or nothingness.’41 The Invisible Man — who aspired to a state of nothingness, in the form of invisibility, and has been reduced to nothingness, as his shabby death indicates — is precisely this human being emptied of subjectivity. His social function at the end of the narrative is to constitute the non-being that symbolically secures the community’s sense of belonging. In an atomized industrial society defined by what he had referred to as ‘sordid commercialism’, Griffin’s identity as an alien is in the end the precondition for a renewed sense of social cohesion.

  Like Dracula, then, and like Frankenstein’s demon, the Invisible Man ‘serves to displac
e the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society outside society itself’, in Franco Moretti’s formulation. ‘Professing to save the individual’, Moretti continues, the society that destroys the monster ‘in fact annuls him’.42 The Invisible Man represents a forensic attempt, in the specific conditions of the fin de siècle, to investigate the meanings of this annulation, or annihilation, or nihilation, of the individual subject.

  Afterlives of The Invisible Man

  Like a handful of other short fictions published after the demise of the three-volume Victorian novel, including the novellas produced by Stevenson and Conrad, The Invisible Man has had an impact on the modern cultural imagination that far outstrips its fairly slight appearance.

  Probably the most popular testament to the impact of Wells’s metaphor of invisibility is James Whale’s fascinating film adaptation of The Invisible Man (1933). Featuring Claude Rains as Griffin, in his debut film, it is a black farce full of disconcerting scenes that seem at the same time comic and horrific. The film was an immensely popular as well as critical success; and, like the same director’s Frankenstein (1931), continued to inspire imitations and sequels throughout the twentieth century. In a statement at once rueful and grateful, Wells himself observed in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), which appeared in print shortly after the film’s release, that ‘to many young people nowadays I am just the author of The Invisible Man’.43