The Invisible Man Read online

  ‘In both Wells’s novella and Whale’s film,’ Keith Williams has claimed, ‘the most philosophically vertiginous conceit is that nothing is being concealed at all except for vacancy itself’; that is, that the disguised protagonist is only ‘an empty signifier of a being’.44 Indirectly, The Invisible Man surely influenced not only James Whale but also Samuel Beckett and J. G. Ballard in this respect. More immediately, it inspired D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, and, most explicitly, Ralph Ellison.

  Invisible Man (1952), Ellison’s fascinating and troubling novel about the experiences of race and racism in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, is a potent testament to the existential implications of Wells’s fable. Its first sentence — like its blunt, deliberately derivative title — is forthright about Ellison’s debt to Wells: ‘I am an invisible man,’ the narrator announces. This novel, too, is to some extent a study of ressentiment, albeit in a subtle and politically complex form. In prose of dreamlike intensity, Ellison reconstructs the experiences of an ambitious, charismatic individual who, purely because his skin is black, is constantly and consistently not seen. ‘I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids,’ he insists. But this does not prevent him from effectively becoming invisible — ‘simply because people refuse to see me’.45 In reinventing the idea of the invisible man in order to represent the experiences of an individual whose consciousness and identity is constituted by a ceaseless conflict with the conditions of everyday life in a racist society, Ellison’s novel implicitly proposed a perceptive reinterpretation of Wells’s ostensibly far simpler, far more superficial novella.

  For Invisible Man hints that, though not notably interested in the racial politics of identity, in spite of the fact that its central character is an albino, The Invisible Man itself is nonetheless a book about the existential condition of both being and not-being. It is about the experience of feeling that, as a social outsider, one is something and nothing at the same time. ‘I was and yet I was unseen,’ Ellison’s narrator comments; ‘It was frightening.’46 From this perspective, in spite of its apparent emphasis on plot as opposed to characterization, Wells’s novel is above all about what it feels like to be invisible. His protagonist is someone who only starts to matter, in the social sense, because he discovers a scientific means of making himself into a form of non-matter. But if this achievement brings him notoriety, and a sort of sovereignty, it also induces in him a corrosive sense of futility. In becoming physically immaterial he comes to feel existentially immaterial too. The former condition is indeed merely the embodiment, if that is the right term, of the latter. And in this sense, as his kinship with Dr Jekyll and Mr Kurtz underlines, he constitutes a characteristic fin de siècle anti-hero.

  The Invisible Man also shaped the attempts by several other writers associated with the modernist movement and its aftermath to represent the blankness or nothingness they perceived at the core of contemporary subjectivity. In the penultimate chapter of The Rainbow (1915), for example, Lawrence describes Ursula’s deepening sense that the people around her are empty ciphers. In trains and on trams she stares at other passengers and sees, ‘beneath their pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them all’. ‘They were dressed-up creatures,’ the narrator continues; ‘She was reminded of the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his clothes.’ These people deny that, at their core, they are ‘dark, fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness’, as Lawrence puts it in one of several echoes of Heart of Darkness in this chapter. Ursula does not. She is like the Invisible Man when he rips off his disguise and strips himself naked, for she refuses to falsify his ‘primeval darkness’ in the form of ‘a social mechanism’.47

  Vladimir Nabokov, too, testified explicitly to the influence of The Invisible Man. ‘H. G. Wells,’ he once announced, ‘a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy.’ He remained especially fond of The Invisible Man. From The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), his first novel in English, to Ada (1969), Nabokov’s prose consistently evinces a fascination for ‘transparent things’, to cite the title of another of his late fictions. In the former, Wells’s novel is one of the fifteen books listed in Sebastian Knight’s library (‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is another).48 In the latter, the narrator directly alludes to ‘the Invisible Man in Wells’ delightful tale’. But it is in Invitation to a Beheading (1935) that Nabokov probably pays his most detailed tribute to The Invisible Man, even though he doesn’t mention it by name. For the central character of this novel, who languishes in a mysterious jail, is a kind of anti-Invisible Man. Cincinnatus, as he is called, is an individual who is in some existential or even ontological sense opaque, and who creates an impression ‘as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another’. He longs to be transparent, however, like everyone else in society; and has therefore learned ‘to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions’.49 At times, too, he seems to strip himself down to the state of nothingness that defines others.

  One evening, for instance, after removing his clothes, ‘he took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk’. When he has completely finished, ‘what was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly colouring the air’. Cincinnatus here closely mimes Griffin’s movements during the scene in the inn when he removed his disguise. And, if he is an anti-Invisible Man because of his obdurate opacity, Cincinnatus nonetheless shares the Invisible Man’s sense of isolation, precisely because he is impenetrable, ‘impervious to the rays of others’. Moreover, he dreams of ‘taking off layer after layer’ of his self until, ‘through the process of gradual divestment’, he reaches ‘the final, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: “I am!” ’50 In this sense, Cincinnatus reinscribes Griffin’s ambition both of abstracting himself from his body and, like Lawrence’s invisible men and women, of definitively identifying not an empty space but a concrete self at his core.

  Like Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges testified to the importance of Wells’s romances and singled out The Invisible Man as especially significant. He seems to have valued above all its evocation of the individual’s fundamental emptiness, futility, and isolation. He summarized it in these haunting terms: ‘The harassed invisible man who has to sleep as though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light is our solitude and our terror.’51 The condition of solitude and terror evoked by Borges — that of an individual compelled to stare into the void lodged like an irreducible fragment at the core of his being — is a long way from the ‘perils of invisibility’ innocuously imagined by W. S. Gilbert in his comic ballad. The perils of invisibility explored by Wells involve not simply physical vexation, or even social exclusion, but also spiritual annihilation.

  In this respect, The Invisible Man enacts the state of being — or non-being — experienced the previous year by the narrator of ‘Under the Knife’. After apparently experiencing his death, he speculates about his physical and metaphysical status in the moments immediately before he starts to return to life:

  Were there other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something that was neither being nor not-being? The covering of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.52

  Darkness, blackness, nothingness … This undead condition, which will haunt a succession of modernist anti-heroes, is the one that the Invisible Man, too, inhabits.

  1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, e
d. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 22. Nietzsche was first translated into English in 1896, but David S. Thatcher has noted that ‘Nietzschean motifs appear in Wells’s work long before Nietzsche was available in English— — certainly before his ideas began to make themselves felt’— — see Nietzsche in England, 1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 82. See too Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H. G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism’, American Scholar 68/3 (1999), 99.

  2 H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly, ed. Simon J. James (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 8, 9.

  3 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 22.

  4 On the optical science behind Griffin’s experiments, see Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: Bodley Head, 2014), 172–9. ‘The invisibility of H. G. Wells,’ Ball later concludes, ‘in which light is not deviated by a substance because it has a refractive index equal to that of air, is possible in principle but not in practice, at least for an ordinary material’ (257).

  5 These suggestive phrases are taken from Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1990), 250.

  6 W. T. Stead, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge && Kegan Paul, 1972), 61.

  7 W. S. Gilbert, ‘The Perils of Invisibility’, in More Bab Ballads (London: Macmillan, 1925), 150, 153.

  8 The anonymous reviewer for The Spectator on 25 September 1897 confirmed that ‘the central notion of Mr H. G. Wells’s grotesque romance, as he has frankly admitted, has been utilized by Mr Gilbert in one of his Bab Ballads’—see H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, A Critical Text of the 1897 New York First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices, ed. Leon Stover (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 206. For an excellent brief overview of the Victorian short stories and novels that make use of the invisibility motif, see John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. David Lake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xvii.

  9 Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 70.

  10 Clement Shorter, in Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, 59–60.

  11 See H. G. Wells, The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, i. 1880–1903, ed. David C. Smith (London: Pickering && Chatto, 1998), 261.

  12 H. G. Wells, ‘Peculiarities of Psychical Research’, Nature 51 (6 December 1894), 121–2.

  13 H. G. Wells, Love and Mr Lewisham, ed. Simon J. James (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 78.

  14 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 163–4.

  15 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), i. 180, 247.

  16 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017), 79; and The War of the Worlds, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017).

  17 Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), 49.

  18 Keith Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 55.

  19 For the broader context, see Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  20 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Invisible Man’, in The Complete Father Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 73, 76.

  21 Shorter, in Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, 59.

  22 For further details, see Ball, Invisible, 92–3, 124–7. As Ball observes, Pearson’s Weekly printed an interview with Röntgen in April 1896, fourteen months before the same periodical began its serial publication of The Invisible Man.

  23 See Allen W. Grove, ‘Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian Imagination’, Literature and Medicine 16/2 (1997), 169.

  24 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 226.

  25 See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).

  26 Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Lake, p. xvii.

  27 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, i. 138.

  28 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. and ed. Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 45. See also Philip Holt, ‘H. G. Wells and the Ring of Gyges’, Science Fiction Studies 57 (July 1992), 236–47.

  29 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 174–5, 177.

  30 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, i. 311–17.

  31 Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72.

  32 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006), 52, 7.

  33 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 221, 241. Linda Dryden notes that other descriptions of Kurtz—as ‘very little more than a voice’, for example, and ‘indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth’—are also ‘suggestive of Griffin’s insubstantiality’—see ‘H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad: A Literary Friendship’, in John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells’s Fin de Siècle: Twenty-First Century Reflections on the Early H. G. Wells (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 103–4.

  34 See Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy’, Journal of Modern Literature 13/1 (1986), 49.

  35 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber && Faber, 1963), 89.

  36 Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), 119.

  37 See Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Stover, 206.

  38 William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2001), 191.

  39 Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–2.

  40 See Wells, Invisible Man, ed. Stover, 208.

  41 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 278.

  42 Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1997), 84, 107.

  43 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, ii. 561.

  44 Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, 54.

  45 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 7.

  46 Ellison, Invisible Man, 408.

  47 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. John Worthen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 498–9. Invisibility is at the core of Lawrence’s conception of the self. In Aaron’s Rod (1922), elaborating this precept, Lawrence depicts Aaron himself, after reflecting on his conflict with his wife, as experiencing an epiphany that involves ‘his idea of himself’ shattering and leaving him ‘maskless and invisible’. ‘Like the Invisible Man,’ the narrator concludes, ‘we are only revealed through our clothes and masks’’ See D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 163–4.

  48 Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011), 33.

  49 Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010), 11.

  50 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 19, 66.

  51 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The First Wells’, in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1964), 86–7.

  52 H. G. Wells, ‘Under the Knife’, in Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 61–2.

  Note on the Text

  The composition and publication history of The Invisible Man — the manuscripts or typescripts for which have not survived — is relatively complicated. There are several printed versions, four of which appeared in 1897, and all of them are slightly different. The version reproduced for this Oxford World’s Classics edition is the first English edition, published by C. Arthur Pearson in London in September 1897. Obvious errors have been silently corrected.

  Wells seems to have worked on a first draft of the story in May and June 1896, and on 12 June 1896 he sent his literary agent James Brand Pinker a 20,000-word version entitled ‘The Man at the Coach and Horses’. He did a good deal more writing in two additional periods, from July to August 1896 and from January to February 1897. Then, three weeks before the novel’s publication in serial form, he decided that it was such a mess that he needed substantially to redraft it. He later testified to the sense of frustration he had felt at this stage of its composition in a letter, dated 2 October 1897, to the critic Edmund Gosse, who had praised The Invisible Man: ‘I am delighted to find that you think well of my story & that you read my work of The Invisible Man. I’ve had the gravest doubts. I’ve scarcely any facility in story building and simple as the thing seems it cost me a vast deal of labour. After it was sold & within three weeks of its serial printing I discovered so much clumsiness that I had to take it all to pieces & reconstruct it. Since when I have funked reading it.’

  The novel first appeared in Pearson’s Weekly from 12 June to 7 August 1897, though it was both abridged and censored for this publication in periodical form — five chapters were removed, as were a number of substantial passages in other chapters, and potentially blasphemous words were systematically cut. The first English edition in book form, subtitled A Grotesque Romance, appeared in Pearson’s imprint on approximately 25 September 1897. Like the serial publication that preceded it, it did not contain the Epilogue that Wells subsequently added, but it does make a considerable number of changes. Pearson then produced a second English edition in November 1897, which contains both a revised ending to the narrative and the Epilogue. In the same month, Edward Arnold published the first American edition, which also contains the Epilogue, albeit a slightly different version, and which also alters the ending of the narrative. In 1924, when Wells was preparing the Atlantic Edition of the novel, he elected to use Arnold’s first American edition as his copy-text.