The Invisible Man

Book 145: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by H.G. Wells, H.G. Wells

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Published in 1897, "The Invisible Man" is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells. The story follows Griffin, a scientist who discovers a way to become invisible. Initially excited by his newfound power, he soon realizes the isolation and moral complications that come with it. Unable to reverse the process, Griffin turns increasingly desperate and violent. The novella explores themes of identity, ethics, and the unintended consequences of unchecked scientific experimentation

Release date: December 28, 2004

Publisher: Bantam Classics

Print pages: 160

Sample

INTRODUCTION

The story of ‘The Ring of Gyges’ is very ancient, almost certainly older than its first recorded appearance in Plato’s Republic (380 BC). There was once, the story goes, a humble shepherd in the ancient kingdom of Lydia (modern-day Turkey). This shepherd, Gyges by name, chanced upon a cave newly revealed by an earthquake, inside of which was a splendid tomb containing the body of a man. This corpse was wearing a golden ring, which Gyges discovered had the magical power of rendering him invisible. The sequel of these events sees Gyges using his new-found power of invisibility to infiltrate the Court of Candaules, the Lydian king; seducing Candaules’ queen; killing Candaules and seizing the throne for himself.

Plato quotes this story in order to make a point about ethics. We act in morally virtuous ways, Plato argues, only because we do not wish to face the disapproval and punishment of our fellow men: virtue is a purely social construction. If we were sure we would never be found out we would act in a morally disinhibited manner – theft, murder, betrayal. Virtue, in other words, consists in being seen.

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the Just Man put on one of them and the Unjust Man the other; no person can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever anyone thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. [Plato, Republic, 360b-c; translated by Benjamin Jowett]

We know that H G Wells read, and was inspired, by Plato: in his Experiment in Autobiography Wells describes Plato’s influence upon him as ‘like the hand of a strong brother taking hold of me and raising me up’. Wells’ fifth novel, The Invisible Man (1897) is a modern retelling of this ancient fable, replacing the magic of the ring with the new logic of science. But the moral force of the tale is similar. As the old sailor, reading a newspaper account of the invisible man in Chapter Fourteen, notes: ‘Suppose he wants to rob – who can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through a cordon of policemen as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man!’ Of course, Wells’ scientist, like Gyges, has larger ambitions than mere theft. He explains to Kemp in Chapter twenty-four that he plans to use murder as a path to power: ‘Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying . . . A Reign of Terror.’ The population of Port Burdock must be terrorised into obedience. He informs the town of his plans:

Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me – the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch – the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First.

This, however, is ‘The Plan That Failed’ – the grand, Gyges-like ambition announced in Griffin’s proclamation comes to nothing. Griffin’s problem is not ambition, or ruthlessness, but a more human level of incompetence, aggravated by the practical problems of his invisibility. This is where Wells’ vision parts company with Plato’s. Not the generalised moral, but the specific frustrations and friction of everyday life. Not the royal usurper, but the petty men. For Wells, even the most startling developments in science cannot change the fact that we do not float magically free of all the petty distractions and awkwardnesses of ordinary life. Men are not kings. In this sense, not even kings are kings.

Invisibility gives Griffin Gyges-like advantages over ordinary, visible humanity; but these advantages are bought at a price. The man is invisible, but his clothes are not – so Griffin must go naked, whatever the weather or temperature if he wishes to remain unobserved. Neither can he eat (‘“Bear in mind,” said Kemp, “his food shows. After eating, his food shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating”’), nor disguise his smell from bloodhounds. Wells’ satire on the grand, and wicked, far-seeing vision of the scientist in this novel turns, as it always does in Wells’ fiction, into a meditation upon the way scientific advance precisely does not vault over the practical problems of ordinary life.

There is, as many critics have noted, one flaw in the Wells’ quasi-scientific extrapolation of Griffins’ invisibility. Wells’ invisible man ought to be blind, of course (an invisible retina stops no photons). Wells knew this fact but chose to ignore it, as have the many writers and filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries who have followed Wells’ lead in making stories about invisible men, women and hobbits. Or perhaps it would be better to say, Wells doesn’t so much ignore the question of Griffin’s blindness as transfer it from a physical to an ethical realm. As a portrait of a scientist (irascible, egotistical, at once petty-minded and grandiose) Griffin is not designed to flatter the profession, but this is a specific rather than a general point. Griffin is blind; he’s just not physically blind. Glorying in his invisibility he sees himself as tyrant of the world; he is blind to the practical obstacles that will prevent that eventuality. Since Frankenstein, SF has been fascinated by the unintended consequences of scientific or technological advance; and ‘unintended consequence’ is just another way of saying ‘the invisible future’. And insofar as ‘the future’ is the realm of science fiction, this novel is saying: SF is blind.

Anthony West (Wells’ son) wrote that though the novel starts as little more than an ingenious conceit, but grows in stature as it develops, rising in its later sections into something especially powerful. ‘My father is moving on from pretence – the simulated reporting of what has happened and cannot happen in the nature of things – to something more genuinely creative. He is no longer having his reader on, but is making him a consenting partner in his imagining’ [Anthony West, H G Wells: Aspects of a Life]. But West adds:

He cannot, however, keep this up through the book, which before long falls foul of the fundamental flaw that G K Chesterton was quick to point out soon after its original publication. The title proves to be misleading: the story does not deal with an invisible man’s interaction with the world we know, but with what befalls an invisible madman, a person impenetrably concealed within his own special frame of private references, resentments, obsessions, and compulsions, and altogether set apart from the generality of mankind.

This, though, is hardly fair. More importantly it rather misses the point of the novel. For one thing, to talk of an individual caught up in ‘private references, resentments, obsessions, and compulsions’ is to describe every example of Homo Sapiens in the world today – West says that Griffin is ‘a person impenetrably concealed’ in those things, but it is part of the existential resonance of Wells’ brilliant conceit to dramatise precisely this sense – that, since we are not telepaths, we are all concealed from one another. It is a person’s outer habiliments only that can be ‘read’, like the clothes the invisible man wears when he arrives at the inn at the beginning of the story.

We can go further, and note that Wells uses his imagined invisibility to upend our, as well as Griffin’s, expectations. Compare the quasi-scientific literalism of Wells’ fable with the approach taken, for example, by Ralph Ellison in his powerful 1952 novel Invisible Man, or Christopher Priest in his later The Glamour (1984). Both of those novels concern invisible characters, but in both instances they are invisible only in the sense that people somehow don’t notice them. Otherwise their flesh is as good at stopping photons as yours or mine. The contrast with Wells’ Griffin is instructive. Science (or pseudo-science) has made him literally invisible. But because rather than despite this fact people notice him all the time. His Gyges ambition compels him to meddle with the world, to disturb people and roil up the town, and this makes him the centre of attention. This is the beautifully expressive irony at the heart of Wells’ fable. It turns out we cannot simply slip away from the world.

Adam Roberts

1The Strange Man’s Arrival

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coach and Horses more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down. ‘A fire,’ he cried, ‘in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!’ He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.

Mrs Hall lit the fire and left him there while she went to prepare him a meal with her own hands. A guest to stop at Iping in the winter-time was an unheard-of piece of luck, let alone a guest who was no ‘haggler’, and she was resolved to show herself worthy of her good fortune.

As soon as the bacon was well under way, and Millie, her lymphatic aid, had been brisked up a bit by a few deftly chosen expressions of contempt, she carried the cloth, plates and glasses into the parlour and began to lay them with the utmost éclat. Although the fire was burning up briskly, she was surprised to see that her visitor still wore his hat and coat, standing with his back to her and staring out of the window at the falling snow in the yard.

His gloved hands were clasped behind him, and he seemed to be lost in thought. She noticed that the melted snow that still sprinkled his shoulders dripped upon her carpet.

‘Can I take your hat and coat, sir,’ she said, ‘and give them a good dry in the kitchen?’

‘No,’ he said without turning.

She was not sure she had heard him, and was about to repeat her question.

He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I prefer to keep them on,’ he said with emphasis, and she noticed that he wore big blue spectacles with sidelights, and had a bushy side-whisker over his coat-collar that completely hid his cheeks and face.

‘Very well, sir,’ she said. ‘As you like. In a bit the room will be warmer.’

He made no answer, and had turned his face away from her again; and Mrs Hall, feeling that her conversational advances were ill-timed, laid the rest of the table things in a quick staccato manner, and whisked out of the room. When she returned he was still standing there like a man of stone, his back hunched, his collar turned up, his dripping hat-brim turned down, hiding his face and ears completely. She put down the eggs and bacon with considerable emphasis, and called rather than said to him, ‘Your lunch is served, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ he said at the same time, and did not stir until she was closing the door. Then he swung round and approached the table.

As she went behind the bar to the kitchen she heard a sound repeated at regular intervals. Chirk, chirk, chirk, it went, the sound of a spoon being rapidly whisked round a basin. ‘That girl!’ she said, ‘There! I clean forgot it. It’s her being so long!’ And while she herself finished mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal stabs for her excessive slowness. She had cooked the ham and eggs, laid the table, and done everything, while Millie (help indeed!) had only succeeded in delaying the mustard. And him a new guest and wanting to stay! Then she filled the mustard pot, and, putting it with a certain stateliness upon a gold and black tea-tray, carried it into the parlour.

She rapped and entered promptly. As she did so her visitor moved quickly, so that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing behind the table. It would seem he was picking something from the floor. She rapped down the mustard pot on the table, and then she noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off and put over a chair in front of the fire. A pair of wet boots threatened rust to her steel fender. She went to these things resolutely, ‘I suppose I may have them to dry now,’ she said in a voice that brooked no denial.

‘Leave the hat,’ said her visitor in a muffled voice, and turning she saw he had raised his head and was sitting looking at her.

For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.

He held a white cloth – it was a serviette he had brought with him – over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice. But it was not that which startled Mrs Hall. It was the fact that all his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. It was bright pink, and shiny just as it had been at first. He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high black linen-lined collar turned up about his neck. The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. T. . .