The Invisible Man

by H.G. Wells

He also alienated many literary figures, quarrelling with Henry James over the purpose of fiction. Modernists like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster despised his work and often defined their new style against his.

Sick of confronting a sense of personal, professional, and social impotence, Griffin is driven, in his dream of making himself invisible, by what Friedrich Nietzsche, exactly a decade before the publication of The Invisible Man, identified as ressentiment — the vindictively resentful attitude fostered in the individual as a result of the negation of the self that, as opposed to the ‘noble morality’ of ‘the masters’, is characteristic of ‘slave morality’.

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 collectively destructive.

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.

This is a glimpse into Infinity in Iping.

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.

Like Dracula, then, and like Frankenstein’s demon, the Invisible Man ‘serves to displace 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.

This novel, too, is to some extent a study of ressentiment, albeit in a subtle and politically complex form.

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.

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.

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.

‘It was there a carriage was upsettled, a year ago and more. A gentleman killed, besides his coachman. Accidents, sir, happen in a moment, don’t they?’

So it was that on the 29th day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping village.

A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a bust door once you’ve busted en.’

They saw in the dim light the headless figure facing them, with a gnawed crust of bread in one gloved hand and a chunk of cheese in the other.

It was the strangest thing in the world to hear that voice coming as if out of empty space, but the Sussex peasants are perhaps the most matter-of-fact people under the sun. Jaffers got up also, and produced a pair of handcuffs. Then he stared.

exclamation. ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,’ said the aerial voice in a tone of savage expostulation. ‘The fact is, I’m all here — head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?’

But a gentleman on tramp sees such a thundering lot of his boots. And if you’ll believe me, I’ve raised nothing in the whole blessed county, try as I would, but them. Look at ’em! And a good county for boots, too, in a general way. But it’s just my promiscuous luck. I’ve got my boots in this county ten years or more. And then they treat you like this.’

‘It’s a beast of a county,’ said the Voice, ‘and pigs for people.’

‘What I want to say at present is this: I need help. I have come to that. I came upon you suddenly. I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent. I could have murdered… . And I saw you——’ ‘Lord!’ said Mr Marvel. ‘I came up behind you — hesitated — went on.’ Mr Marvel’s expression was eloquent. ‘Then stopped. “Here,” I said, “is an out-cast like myself. This is the man for me.” So I turned back and came to you. You.

Help me — and I will do great things for you. An Invisible Man is a man of power.’ He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently.

No doubt there was a slight uneasiness in the air, but people for the most part had the sense to conceal whatever imaginative qualms they experienced.

His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a sort of reluctant alacrity.

‘Another of those asses,’ said Dr Kemp. ‘Like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with his “’Visible Man a-coming, sir!” I can’t imagine what possesses people. One might think we were in the thirteenth century.’

The feeling that is called ‘eerie’* came upon him.

I have made a discovery. I meant to keep it to myself. I can’t. I must have a partner. And you … We can do such things … But to-morrow. Now, Kemp, I feel as though I must sleep or perish.’

Kemp stood in the middle of the room staring at the headless garment. ‘I suppose I must leave you,’ he said. ‘It’s — incredible. Three things happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions — would make me insane. But it’s real! Is there anything more that I can get you?’ ‘Only bid me good-night,’ said Griffin. ‘Good-night,’ said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand. He walked sideways to the door.

Suddenly the dressing-gown walked quickly towards him. ‘Understand me!’ said the dressing-gown. ‘No attempts to hamper me or capture me! Or——’ Kemp’s face changed a li...

I said: ‘I will devote my life to this. This is worth while.’ You know what fools we are at two-and-twenty?’ ‘Fools then or fools now,’ said Kemp. ‘As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!

A sort of skeleton of light.

And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp; in fact, the whole fabric of a man, except the red of his blood and the dark pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue — so little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part, the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water.’

I could be Invisible,” I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino* with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars. “I could be Invisible,” I repeated.

‘You don’t mean to say there’s an Invisible Cat at large in the world?’ said Kemp. ‘If it hasn’t been killed,’ said the Invisible Man. ‘Why not?’ ‘Why not?’ said Kemp.

I thought I was killing myself, and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last.

To have told my secret would have given me away — made a mere show and rarity of me. Nevertheless I was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke.

I experienced again the strange sensation of seeing the cloth disappear, and so I came round to the windy hillside and the sniffing old clergyman mumbling, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” at my father’s open grave. ‘ “You also,” said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards the grave. I struggled, shouted, appealed to the mourners, but they continued stonily following the service; the old clergyman, too, never faltered, droning and sniffing through the ritual. I realised I was invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their grip on me. I struggled in vain, I was forced over the brink, the coffin rang hollow as I fell upon it, and the gravel came flying after me in spadefuls. Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me. I made convulsive struggles and awoke.

‘But you begin now to realise,’ said the Invisible Man, ‘the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter — no covering — to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.’

You don’t blame me, do you? You don’t blame me?’ ‘I never blame any one,’ said Kemp. ‘It’s quite out of fashion.*

‘Blundering into your house, Kemp,’ he said, ‘changes all my plans. For you are a man that can understand. In spite of all that has happened, in spite of this publicity, of the loss of my books, of what I have suffered, there still remain great possibilities, huge possibilities——

Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.’

He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver, and saw the sea far off, very blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the head, and the multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet.

It was like the slow spreading of a poison. 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. Presently they could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.

He is a bachelor man — his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no women folk in the house.

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

(In 1898, in an article in the Academy on ‘What the People Read’, ‘a Wife’ is interviewed and asked whether she likes ‘novels about the future’ of the kind Wells was publishing from The Time Machine (1895) on — ‘She pondered a moment, wrinkling her brows. “Well, I can’t say that I exactly like them”, she said; “but one has to read them, because everyone talks about them”.’)