The Politics of Invisibility

Drawing on contemporary concerns about surveillance and anxieties over revolution, Wells explored the subversive possibilities inherent in invisibility by presenting it in this novella as a radical condition. In his 1895 book, The

Psychology of Revolution, the French sociologist, Gustave Le Bon, warned that the state was being undermined by the ‘invisible powers’ of revolutionary agitators. Le Bon was not the first writer to suggest that political contagion was the work of unseen subversives: in 1870, the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, proposed to his colleagues that insurrections should be led by ‘a force that is invisible, that no one admits’, and advised his comrades to move ‘like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest’. Existing ‘without insignia, titles, or official rights’, the modern terrorist would appear ‘all the stranger for having none of the paraphernalia of power’. Along with Le Bon’s theory of the subversive potential of the unseen, Bakunin’s fantasy of untraceable revolutionaries indicates how the concept of invisibility had become political shorthand for radicalism long before the publication of The Invisible Man.[9] As the titular villain admits to his nemesis, Dr. Kemp, his condition is not the result of any scientific ‘method’ but is, instead, the outcome of ‘an idea’ (89) that inspires him to ‘transcend magic’ and dream up the ‘magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man – the mystery, the power, the freedom’ (92).[10]

According to contemporary theories of the visible, tell-tale signs of individuality brought the modern subject within the panoptical view and legal grasp of the state. Francis Galton, the British pioneer of fingerprint technology, was influenced by the methods of anthropometric observation being advanced by Alphonse Bertillon in France, claiming in his 1892 book, Finger Prints, that his system would present evidence in an ‘easily legible form, and in a trustworthy shape.’ Although ageing might limit the usefulness and even truthfulness of the photographic images of upon which anthropometry relied, fingerprint data presented the police with permanent and unchanging evidence: ‘The fact of an almost complete persistence in the peculiarities of the ridges from birth to death, may now be considered as determined. They existed before birth, and they persist after death, until effaced by decomposition.’ According to Galton, these features were indelibly marked upon bodies which, in turn, left traces of their presence for detection, collection and presentation as ‘overwhelming’ evidence. By differentiating ‘each man from all the rest of the human species’, this technique represented the ultimate means of tracing suspicious or wanted individuals. In identifying finger prints, Galton appeared to have finally established an invariable ‘value of identity’; this method, because the information upon which it was based could never change, could betray anyone throughout the course of his or her life. Providing the state with the means of recording the identities of criminals,

fingerprinting tied everyone to a unique and undeniable signature that, Galton insisted, would protect the state against the combined problems of individual ‘unveracity’ and the ‘continentalization’ of Britain by European immigrants.[11] Anchoring suspects to inescapably fixed identities, the objective data that fingerprinting recorded was also intended by him to serve as a key component in the establishment of modern British citizenship.[12]

The Invisible Man was written against the backdrop of the increasing politicization of the body and its subjection to state power by scientists like Galton in England and Bertillon in France. Seemingly infallible, both systems assuaged anxieties over the unknown, subversive and criminally inclined individual, whose identity, when beyond surveillance, remained fluid and untraceable. The impossibility of defying such surveillance is recognized by Wells when, in The Invisible Man, Griffin reappears as a residual image, or ‘greasy glimmer of humanity’ (104) when exposed to the smog and pollution of London. Like Galton’s finger prints, his body leaves traces that cannot be overcome even with the help of invisibility. However, he evades his pursuers in the city as his corporeal self remains vague and indeterminate, refusing to return to its original, identifiable state, until he is finally killed at the end of the tale.

Opposed to authority in any form, anarchists were presented by the conservative press as fanatics and ‘wretches bent on murder and devastation’, frightening the middle classes of fin de siècle Britain, Europe and North America.[13] Their ‘no-government’ principles offered an alternative to Marxist orthodoxy by encouraging the individual revolutionary with a rather broadly defined sense of freedom laced with political egoism.[14] Anarchism appealed to impulsive socialists who preferred its practical character to the scientific approach

of Karl Marx who, along with Friedrich Engels, had purged them from the International Workingmen’s Association in 1872.[15] While the spectacular tactic of ‘propaganda by deed’ resulted in a number of high profile political killings of European and American heads of state along with less discriminate attacks on church processions, theatres and cafés in Spain and France, British radicals avoided such activity: the unexplained and fatal explosion that occurred at the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 and would later inspire Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, was the closest that late Victorian Britain came to anarchist terror.[16]

Wells first explored anarchism in his satirical short story, ‘The Stolen Bacillus’, published in the Pall Mall Budget in June, 1894.[17] The tale opens with a scientist boasting to an anarchist that his cholera cultures, if released into the water supply of London, will unleash ‘mysterious, untraceable death’ across the city. Regarding bacteria as a far more effective weapon in class warfare than dynamite, the terrorist swallows what he believes to be a cholera sample, yells ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ and disappears into the city, unaware that he has ingested bacteria that will turn his skin blue, transforming him into a particularly visible man. While dismissive of anarchism, the story does suggest the possibility of an attack on London by invisible and uncontrollable agents – the ‘little particles’ and ‘mere atomies’ (3) that are capable of destroying the metropolis – by speculating on the threat posed by the particular and invisible to the wellbeing of the collective.[18] In “The Diamond Maker”, also published in the Pall Mall Budget, an encounter between a tramp and a flâneur turns on another comic fusion of political and scientific ideas. Claiming to have invented synthetic diamonds through a risky process involving high explosives, the tramp, fearful of being ‘lagged as an Anarchist’, (52) describes being forced to go underground by police who mistake his lab for a bomb factory.[19]

The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man anticipates some of the themes that were crystallised in Wells’s later writings, where he insisted that socialism must be ‘saturated with consideration’. Mistrustful of competitive ideologies like individualism, anarchism and even liberalism, and their tendencies for political ‘self-seeking’, he preferred the ‘impersonal’ quality of large-scale, collective political action. The Samurai, an élite whose formation he proposed in his polemical novel of 1905, A Modern Utopia, could, he believed, remedy the chaos represented by figures like Griffin by offering ideological and cultural direction to the masses.[20] The germ of this belief in the need for collective activity leading to the gradual transformation of modern society is advanced in The Invisible Man.

Griffin’s individualism is dualistic as he initially entertains professional aspirations but turns to terrorism after his dreams fail to materialise. His violence disrupts the placidity of Britain and becomes increasingly political, while his invisibility results from the fractured subjectivity that emerged during the late nineteenth century as a result of the disorienting urban phenomena of poverty, dislocation and desperation. His brief but ‘explosive’ (19) stay in the village of Iping ends when the locals, interpreting his scientific research as evidence of political criminality, regard him as ‘an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives’. On escaping the village, Griffin finds himself sliding down the social scale towards itinerancy and achieving true economic and political invisibility, enslaving the tramp, Marvel, whom he considers an ‘outcast like myself’ (47) and equally marginalised being. His crimes escalate from robbery to murder and the warning issued by his nemesis, Dr Kemp, that the invisible man is ‘mad’, ‘inhuman’ and the embodiment of ‘pure selfishness’, suggests that invisibility has transformed him socially as well as scientifically. By inducing anarchic rage and ‘brutal self-seeking’, it transforms him into a rebellious and dangerously advanced version of the nineteenth century bourgeois.[21]

As his villainy gains momentum, Griffin becomes a more politicised figure, with Wells describing him during his encounter with Kemp as an ‘invisible citizen’ (80). In revealing that he has destroyed property before his arrival in Iping, the invisible man describes several episodes of chaos, beginning in the rented room in

a London slum where his scientific research began in poverty. Conscious of the ‘sordid commercialism’ (95) of the metropolis, and dreaming of‘all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world’, the self-styled superman functions like a radical, if but no less personally-motivated, version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘übermensch’: finding a higher form of existence in invisibility, he later on exacts violent revenge on the ‘little men’ of rural Sussex (54).[22]

Griffin also reveals that his first action as an invisible man was to punish a Jewish landlord by burning his lodgings in London:

‘I slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs and bedding thereby, led the gas to the affair, by means of an india-rubber tube, and waving farewell to the room left it for the last time.’

‘You fired the house!’ exclaimed Kemp.

‘Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail - and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.’ (102)

With arson, Griffin realizes the subversive potential of his new condition, removing himself from the normative political and cultural practices of the English middle class and aligning himself with contemporary perceptions of London’s immigrant communities. In his xenophobic memoir, At Scotland Yard (1904), the CID detective and anarchist hunter, John Sweeney, complained that ‘hordes’ of foreigners had taken over the East End during the 1890s, and noted that ‘about the immigrants there is a great deal that is unattractive,’ including a ‘tendency to incendiarism’.[23] But in this story it is the English tenant of a Polish Jew who carries out the allegedly foreign practice of burning down a lodging house. As Dryden suggests, this act is the result of the uniquely urban pressures of alienation and the fragmentation of subjectivity that are the key political causes of Griffin’s invisibility.[24] He takes his first step into the world as an invisible man after committing this particularly un-English outrage, as his invisibility both others and links him to continental foreigners. In disappearing from sight, Griffin becomes

de-Anglicised and renders himself as unreadable as the errant foreigners whose identities Francis Galton sought to record. [25]

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 762