Before Griffin realizes that, in practice, his invisibility will also constitute a disability, forcing him to go naked and defenceless on foot among the streets of the city, he momentarily seems to have redeemed the alienated condition of what Wells, in a phrase that was fashionable at the fin de siècle, refers to in the novel as the ‘urban brain-worker’ (21). This is the metropolitan archetype famously diagnosed as ‘neurasthenic’ by the American psychologist George Miller Beard in the 1880s; one whose relationship to his body, as a result of being imbricated in modern forms of urban labour, has become more alienated and attenuated the more his mental life has been developed over and above his physical activity.25
Wells had himself faced precisely this existential challenge when, impoverished and unemployed, he moved to London in 1888 and, as he testified in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), found accommodation costing four shillings a week in ‘a partitioned-off part of an attic’ on Theobald’s Road in Holborn, a far-from salubrious region of the capital at the time. In this ‘period of stress’, fruitlessly seeking jobs with ‘scholastic agents’, he ‘ate at irregular intervals and economically’, and was forced to find ‘light, shelter and comfort’ in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Wells discovered at this juncture that, although over the previous five years his brain had ‘acquired as much, decided as much and was exercised as much as if it had been inside the skull of a university scholar’, it was now ‘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.26 In Simmel’s terms, his ‘intellectualistic’ mentality provided both a refuge from this fraught situation and a retreat farther into it.
Wells openly explored the embattled relationship of the metropolis and mental life in his fiction of the Edwardian period. In Tono-Bungay (1909), for example, Wells’s narrator, whose travails are manifestly based on his own youthful experiences, discovers with a shock, on arriving in London as a young man bursting with scientific ambition, that a metropolitan existence, in contrast to a provincial one, is necessarily anonymous and atomized, and that on the streets he is little more than a nonentity:
I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not perceive how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and distribute my energies. In the first place I became invisible. If I idled for a day, no one except my fellow students (who evidently had no awe of me) remarked it. No one saw my midnight taper; no one pointed me out as I crossed the street as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the next place I became inconsiderable.27
As pedestrians, especially in the era of the rise of the automobile, individuals remain no more than unnoticed components of the mass of people. The most corrosive everyday condition of the narrator’s alienation – as had been the case for the Invisible Man little more than a decade earlier – is a sense of being universally unnoticed and unseen.
‘Wells, who knew from his unemployed period what it was like to wander London as an invisible man,’ as one of his recent biographers has written, ‘rejoices imaginatively at the revenge Griffin takes on an unappreciative world yet still makes it clear that his alter ego is a dangerous psychopath.’28 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. He redeems his social invisibility in the form of physical invisibility. His powerlessness becomes the source of his power. In The Invisible Man, Wells thus literalizes the metaphor he later used to describe the narrator of Tono-Bungay.
But if, after successfully conducting his experiment on himself, Griffin briefly experiences a sense of evolutionary superiority over the rest of his species, as an Übermensch who appears almost to have transcended the limitations of bodily existence, his body itself promptly takes revenge on him for this attempt to escape its constraints. To put it in terms of The Time Machine (1895), Wells’s first novel, the primitive Morlock in him takes revenge on the over-civilized Eloi. Dystopian realities irrupt into his utopian aspirations.
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’ (92). Seconds later, though, he realizes that – naked as he is so as not to betray his existence with clothes – it might not be so easy to ‘revel in [his] extraordinary advantage’ (92). The embattled flâneur is suddenly forced to struggle for existence in the face of hostile forces that threaten to drive him to a state of extinction.
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 trampled 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, comically, his sneezes reveal his hidden presence to passers-by or, more fatally, to his pursuers. 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.’29
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. In trying to become superhuman, he becomes subhuman. Fleeing on foot in the polluted streets of the metropolis, he accumulates ‘dirt about [his] ankles, floating smuts and dust upon [his] skin’ (101). Rain and fog, he realizes, will not obscure him as it obscures ordinary people. Rain will make him ‘a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man – a bubble’ (101).
More devastatingly still, he intuits that he ‘should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity’ (101). He is a mere silhouette of a man, as empty, insubstantial and vulnerable as an oily bubble of air.
The Invisible Man is in part, then, 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, The 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, over-developed states of consciousness that interested Wells’s contemporaries.
Take Stevenson’s novel. There, 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 the beastly materiality of his body in the form of Mr Hyde. A decade later, it is as a result of this same antimony that Griffin dramatically ‘cut[s] himself off from his kind’ (114). Wells, indeed, appears deliberately to allude to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in The Invisible Man. The scene in the latter where, because of Griffin’s savage cruelty, ‘a little child playing near [a] gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken’ (115), irresistibly recalls the one in the former where Hyde, stumping along a street, callously collided with ‘a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street’ and ‘trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground’.30
There is no more indisputable proof of the inhumanity of either of these monstrous men than their vindictively violent treatme
nt 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’ (33). Conrad, who subsequently dedicated The Secret Agent (1907) to Wells, and who probably based the terrifying character of the Professor in this novel on Griffin, 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.31
In a letter to Wells from December 1898, Conrad emphasized that what had impressed him about The Invisible Man was that it had contrived ‘to give over humanity into the clutches of the Impossible and yet manage to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly’.32 Like the protagonists of Stevenson’s and Conrad’s roughly contemporaneous fables, the Invisible Man is divided between a dream of the impossible and the everyday reality of the desiring, grieving, sickening body. Conrad’s hesitation between ‘up’ and ‘down’ in this expressive but syntactically rather complicated sentence is symptomatic of the competing, contradictory relationship between the superhuman and the subhuman in Wells’s novella.
What of Heart of Darkness? Kurtz, the horrifying character at its centre, is in the narrator Marlow’s account one of those rare, remarkable men who has stepped over ‘the threshold of the invisible’. He is, moreover, ‘hollow at the core’.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. Indeed, paradoxically, it is precisely its refusal to reproduce the intricate operations of consciousness, in contrast to novels published by Henry James and others at this time, that it mimes so effectively the ‘crisis of interiority’ that was such a significant feature of the fin de siècle.34
The novel’s commitment to surface over depth, narrative over characterization, thus registers Wells’s sense of the crisis of interiority at the level of form as well as content. Rachel Bowser is right to argue both that The Invisible Man ‘invites the reader to interrogate the promise of deep interiority as offered by realist fiction’, and that its protagonist’s experiences ‘expose the fiction of authentic interiority’.35
Wells returned to the horror of formlessness, the horror of emptiness, in The History of Mr Polly a little over a decade later. There, in a provincial context as opposed to the colonial one explored by Conrad, his narrator reports that, as a result of a peculiarly petty commercial rivalry, ‘Mr Polly felt himself the faintest underdeveloped simulacrum of man that had ever hovered on the verge of non-existence.’ Mr Polly, it should be noted, is a reader of Conrad (‘Conrad’s prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar, deep-coloured effect’). It is only when he acts heroically in a house-fire which he himself has started, in an attempt to commit suicide, that he feels alive; and that the empty space inside him for a moment seems to be filled. One of his neighbours, not realizing he is an arsonist and agreeing with the popular consensus that he ‘ought to have a medal’, declares ‘that Mr Polly had a crowded and richly decorated interior’ – a deliciously suburban celebration of an individual’s inner life. ‘It was as if he regretted past intimations that Mr Polly was internally defective and hollow,’ comments the narrator.36
From the perspective afforded by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel’s forensic concerns with what might be characterized, in the terms of Conan Doyle’s contemporaneous detective fiction, as ‘The Case of the Disappearing Subject’, the Invisible Man is one of those whom T. S. Eliot subsequently designated ‘Hollow Men’.37 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 sad, if not despairing tones: ‘Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.’38 The Hollow Man, Eliot’s archetype of emptiness, has in Wellsian terms lowered his refractive index to the zero degree.
As Griffin instinctively understands when he imagines himself walking on the streets of the anonymous city in the rain and fog, he is finally no more than the ‘glistening surface of a man’, a ‘greasy glimmer of humanity’ (101).
Echoing Eliot’s description of Marlowe’s strange play The Jew of Malta (c.1590), Bernard Bergonzi once classified The Invisible Man as a ‘tragic farce’, and compared its protagonist to Barabas, Marlowe’s homicidal anti-hero, because he is ‘both farcical and murderous’.39 It is a useful attempt to explicate the concept of the ‘grotesque romance’, which is the subtitle of Wells’s novel.
To this end, it might also be productive to conceptualize The Invisible Man in terms of Northrop Frye’s category, in his Anatomy of Criticism, of the ‘demonic parody’, which he outlines as part of his account of the archetypes that shape the ‘apocalyptic conception of human life’. ‘In the sinister human world one individual pole is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will,’ Frye argues; ‘the other pole is represented by the pharmakos or sacrificial victim, who has to be killed to strengthen the others.’ He concludes that ‘in the most concentrated form of the demonic parody, the two become the same’.40 The Invisible Man, a character from this generic tradition, is at once a ‘tyrant-leader’ and a ‘sacrificial victim’.
Frye’s categories certainly capture the novel’s unstable compound of humour and horror; but they probably don’t give shape to the development or displacement The Invisible Man describes, over the course of its structure, from the comic to the tragic. For there is an irreversible darkening of the book’s mood about two thirds of the way through the narrative, at the precise point at which the Invisible Man, in his doomed attempt to solicit assistance from a former university acquaintance, a sober-minded professional scientist called Dr. Kemp, who will shortly betray him to the police, commences in his own voice 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, and from the present to the past, Griffin comes to seem increasingly tragic. Then, when the plot reverts again to the present, and to the ever more 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, it is finally a grimly farcical tragedy.
There are hints of this tragedy, though, which hinges on Griffin’s horrifying nihilistic condition, well before that point. It is intermittently present in the somewhat 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’, as the narrator puts it with superb economy of expression, a sense of the void, of non-being, intrudes on the ordinary and the everyday (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 (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’ (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’ (10). Mrs Hall, Griffin’s landlady, insists that he looks ‘more like a divin’ ‘elmet than a human man!’ (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’ (13). Not a ‘human man’, then, but an inhuman man. 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 removed his spectacles and failed to replace them: ‘they were beside him on the table, and it seemed to her that his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow’ (16). Here is the Hollow Man.
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’ (18). Instead of the pale pink flesh he expected to see, he explains, there was nothing: ‘Just blackness’ (18). This is a glimpse into infinity in Iping. Fearenside rationalizes this experience by determining that, far from being the albino the reader knows him to be, Griffin is in fact a black man – ‘I tell you, he’s as black as my hat’ (18). Or, on further reflection, that he is ‘a piebald’ or ‘a kind of half-breed’ (18). Griffin’s identity as an outsider, ironically underpinned by his albinism, is cemented by these racialized associations, which are erroneous but revealing.
Fearenside fails of course to understand that the blackness beneath the stranger’s clothing is in fact 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’ [29]). Mr Henfrey had himself unconsciously mimed or replicated the emptiness of the Invisible Man’s interior when, in Chapter 2, 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’ (12).
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