Commodity Culture and Political Chaos

At his most vulnerable in London, the invisible man’s paradoxical dependence on the spectacle of commodity capitalism becomes apparent when he decides to lie low in a shopping arcade. Allowing himself to be locked in for the night in the store, suitably monickered Omnium’s (a ‘big establishment where everything is to be bought’, 108), he watches shop assistants at work among the commodities as they arrange ‘boxes of goods, the hanging fabrics, the festoons of lace, the boxes of sweets in the grocery section, the displays of this and that’ (109). At large during a moment of profound political and cultural change, the period in which the ethos of the politicized individual was being displaced by the rise of consumerism, Griffin spends his first night as the invisible man in what Walter Benjamin would later term a ‘temple’ of commodity culture.[26] However, during his stay in the emporium, Griffin does not realize that this retail activity, and the homogenization of culture that the aptly named superstore represents, is eroding the kind of radical political action that he is beginning to stand for. Competing with capitalism and its persuasive advertising techniques, anarchism and its revolutionary tendencies appear destined to be replaced by the equally revolutionary imperatives of commodity culture and its appeal to the modern consumer. His pessimistic essay of 1912, ‘The Labour Unrest’, also cast a critical glance at the consumer culture that had been developing since the second half of the nineteenth century. Complaining that, by dominating everyday life, commodities were undermining the traditional loyalty of British workers, Wells pointed to the erosion of traditional values by the ‘spectacular’ fantasy of consumption, a phenomenon that would, he warned, lead to political instability. Valourising ‘amusement, aimlessness, and excitement’, the advertising industries, the modern press and the new medium of cinema were all, he warned, saturating working class imaginations. Wells claimed that this process was, since the 1870s, alienating workers from traditional sources of authority:

He sees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it out of toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight’s sake, the show, and the pride, and the folly […] The Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motorcars, luxury, and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at work, will gather strength.[27]

Despite its spectacular aura, capitalist modernity was too fragile to withstand the ‘destructive outbreaks’ that it generated because its cyclical crises were provoking disorder and revolution. Although written fifteen years after the publication of The Invisible Man, this essay explains Wells’s disdain for capitalism, which left workers dissatisfied by making modest levels of consumption appear inadequate. The intensifying influence of its ‘spectacle of pleasure’ was, he feared, encouraging selfishness at the cost of more conventional political, economic and cultural practices, and could only end with ‘a real and irreparable class war’, that would be characterized by other, irregular forms of ‘anarchistic crime’. This society of the spectacle, which he identified as having its origins in the late Victorian period, threatened to unleash the kind of chaos that the invisible man embodies. Having already instilled worrying levels of discontent, it promised a future of ‘incurable’ class conflict. Forcing workers to consume on such a scale, capitalism was, Wells believed, producing ruthlessly ‘insurgent‘ revolutionaries whose lack of compassion mirrors Griffin’s selfishness. Unable to resist the lure of commodities, he indulges himself by looting the emporium for clothes and, after committing the crime, admits: ‘I began to feel a human being again’ (111).

The invisible man’s situation is complicated further when he is forced to abandon his clothes and flee the ‘hopeless’ (104) emporium, where he has failed to realise his ambitions for limitless (and free) consumption. On the streets, he finds that he accumulates a coat of ‘floating smuts and dirt’ that creates a silhouette of his body and now, ‘abroad – in the London air’ (114), accepts the impossibility of remaining truly invisible in the metropolis. Pollution, the by-product of urban consumption and production, imposes a residual visibility on Griffin along with the realisation that he will never realize the ‘thousand advantages’ he had imagined for himself. His decision to relocate to a more rural setting is motivated by his acceptance of the ‘helpless absurdity’ posed by ‘an Invisible Man in a […] crowded civilised city’, but his presence in Iping amounts to an unresolved contradiction, as he remains just as vulnerable there as in London, where ‘even to

me […] the rows of London houses stood latched, barred and bolted impregnably’ (109).

Constantly threatened by discovery, Griffin finds that his chances are as limited in rural England as in the metropolis and announces his ambition to seize Port Burdock with the determination of a Jacobin:

‘The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes - no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways - scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.’ (125)

The remainder of the novella hinges on Griffin’s attempted campaign of ‘judicious slaying’, which is prevented by the mobilisation of the entire working population of Sussex and its infrastructure by Kemp, who aims to capture the now-revolutionary villain by organising ‘the whole countryside’ against the invisible man:

In the morning he had still been simply a legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp’s drily worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and the countryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity […] Every passenger train along the lines on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton, and Horsham, travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and fields. (129-30)

By sealing off the railway, Kemp indicates that he has learned that his nemesis can be at his most mobile, as he was in London, when following the movement of commodities. Griffin’s engagement with goods generates conflict within the tale, and his need for commodities and capital repeatedly exposes him to the public gaze. When Marvel asks the invisible man, ‘Ain’t there any stuff to you?’ (46), he does not just point to his master’s transparency, but also wonders how he might resist the lure of commodity culture and its circulation of ‘stuff’. Likewise, Kemp, who originally fears that his enemy is as ‘free as the air’, (87) also understands that his condition renders him vulnerable: having heard Griffin’s account of his experience in London, he realises that the capitalist grid of labour, communications and commodity-flow might facilitate surveillance and aid in the capture of the invisible man.

Griffin’s exclusion from what Wells termed the ‘parade’ of capital leads him to deliver a final, autocratic ultimatum: [28]

There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. 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. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example – a man named Kemp. Death starts for him today. (134)

Posing at once as a Jacobin and Bonapartist terrorist, the invisible man echoes the militant language of the dictatorship that assumed control of the French revolution in 1793, and whose calendar he emulates. As well as challenging the monarch, Griffin promises to introduce the British public to the violent and inherently foreign methods of revolutionary France as he assumes the mantle of controller of the revolutionary crowd, declaring: ‘Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also’ (134). Yet, despite this attempt to terrorise the masses, the invisible man is defeated by an unassuming group of workers at the edge of the town of Port Burdock, who rescue Kemp in the ‘blistering fag end of the street’. Reassured by the crowd of ‘human beings about him’ (145), he corners Griffin amid signs of urban normality: a tram, a police station, the Jolly Cricketers pub and, most importantly, the team of labourers he turns on his enemy: ‘“The Invisible Man!” he cried to the navvies, with a vague indicative gesture […] and placed a burly group between him and the chase.’ The dynamic of the pursuit is reversed by these men, who, joined by a tram conductor, defend the scientist and bring Griffin’s short-lived dictatorship to a very brutal end:

the spade of the navvy came whirling through the air above him, and struck something with a dull thud […] In another second there was a simultaneous rush upon the struggle […] And there was no shouting after Kemp’s cry – only a sound of blows and feet and a heavy breathing […] a dozen hands gripped, clutched and tore at the Unseen. The tram conductor suddenly got the neck and shoulders and lugged him back. (146-7)

Workers and petit-bourgeois unite to defeat the invisible threat and in doing so, restore Griffin’s battered body to its visible state. The anarchist finally assumes a legible form in the eyes of the British public as his ‘clouded and opaque’ (135) body begins to appear. No longer embodying the dangerously abstract imperatives of revolutionary politics, Griffin’s ‘glassy’ (148) corpse gradually becomes visible

and is returned, by means of his violent death at the hands of these workers, to its normal condition. However, his now-visible appearance underlines his otherness as the crowd discovers that he is an albino, a condition that amplifies his otherness and marginality. By concealing Griffin’s remains, his killers attempt to prevent his strange remains from serving as a public spectacle and, in doing so, contain the threat that he poses.

One year before the novel was published, Gustave Le Bon theorised in his panicky study, The Crowd, that the individual would be no match for the popular, collective action of the mob. Noting that ‘the substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age,’ Le Bon warned of the ‘extreme mental inferiority of crowds,’ which he regarded as an extremely dangerous.[29] Despite sporadic radical activity, British class politics stabilised during the second half of the nineteenth century as English workers proved resistant to foreign-borne theories such as anarchism; in rescuing Kemp, the navvies protect themselves and their community from the dangers posed by such revolutionary individualism.[30] Their violent but reassuring activity ensures that the collective, and not the individual, triumphs, foreshadowing Wells’s Fabian notion of the need for political and organizational ‘synthesis’ among socialists.[31] However the tale’s closure is not so certain, as the last word is given to the tramp, Marvel, who acquires the diaries containing the encoded secrets of invisibility and reads from the surviving notebooks, ‘full of secrets […] Wonderful secrets!’ (150). This indecipherable code is left in the hands of a dangerously independent figure - the economically destitute tramp, who, in the popular imagination, functions as another kind of invisible man. These illegible notes, and their marginal owners, anticipate Wells’s later complaint about the ‘alien […] foreign and incomprehensible’ qualities of anarchism, made in New Worlds for Old.[32]

Griffin is a more complex and dangerous villain than the preposterous anarchist of ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ and the hapless Diamond Maker. Alienated from society and frustrated by the denial of his bourgeois and professional aspirations, he embodies all that Wells believed was wrong with the impulsive and uncoordinated political activity of the anarchists, something that appears down to the finest detail: Griffin’s threat to Kemp is issued on an unpaid for letter, owing ‘2d. to pay’ (134). As Leon Stover has suggested, H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances reflect the broader ideological patterns found in his later work, and within these tales, there is little room for individualistic behaviour in the face of much greater forces of political evolution; with its violent ending, The Invisible Man locates the radical, individual anarchist within the context of what Wells considered to be a more responsible form of socialism.[33]

[1] Steven McClean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2009), 81, 66.

[2] Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study in the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), 114.

[3] J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Companion (London: Macmillan, 1979), 90.

[4] Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 116.

[5] Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand’, American Scholar, 68 (1999), 89-103.

[6] James Whale’s 1933 film adaptation replaced the invisible man’s political motivations with private ambitions. In this version the villain is driven mad by his addiction to the aptly named drug, ‘monocaine’. The privatized logic of Hollywood’s invisible men continued with Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (2000), in which the political potential of invisibility is replaced with sexual violence as an invisible scientist escapes from his lab to commit rape. By presenting Griffin as an apolitical villain, these films erased the Wells’s original, political theme. See Keith Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 49.

[7] See Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 71-6.

[8] See Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), especially 170-7. Quotation from 173.

[9] See Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, trans. Bernard Mall from La psychologie des revolutions (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 16, 106. See Mikhail Bakunin, Letter to Sergei Nečaev, 4 June, 1870, Selected Writings, trans. Stephen Cox (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 192. See Bakunin, Letter to Albert Richard, 1 April, 1870, 180-1.

[10] H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005). Citations are provided parenthetically within the text.

[11] The possibility of using fingerprints contain to identify criminal suspects first occurred to Galton while he was preparing a lecture on Bertillon’s methods of personal identification for the Royal Institution in 1888. The system of ‘Bertillonage’ was begun by the Paris Prefecture in 1883 and by 1887 police had collated 60,000 entries. Data included photographic and measurement records of a suspect’s entire body, face, birthmarks, tattoos, scars and body parts such as noses, ears, hands and feet. See Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan,1892), 3, 10, 12, 148-9.

[12] In 1905 Wells expressed his desire to see the emergence of a similarly surveillant society in A Modern Utopia, where he predicted that information on every individual would be recorded in an integrated system and ‘docketed’ by the state. See H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Dent 1998), 96.

[13] ‘The Conviction of Vaillant’, Times, 12 January 1894, 5. Contemporary newspaper reports are full of lurid references to the anarchist threat, as is Félix Dubois’s The Anarchist Peril. See Félix Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, trans. Ralph Derechef (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), originally published as Le péril anarchiste (Paris: Flammarion, 1894).

[14] Peter Kropotkin, ‘Anarchist Communism’, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 44-78 (65). See Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana, 1993), especially Chapters 18, ‘Michael Bakunin: The Fanatic of Freedom’ and 19, ‘Peter Kroptkin: The Revolutionary Evolutionist’.

[15] See Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist (London: Penguin, 2009), 255-60.

[16] See George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), especially Chapter 10, ‘Anarchism in France’ and Chapter 12, ‘Anarchism in Spain’. For an account of the cultural and political impact of anarchism in Britain, see Haia Shapayer-Makov, ‘Anarchism in British Public Opinion, 1880-1914’, Victorian Studies 31 (1988), 487-516.

[17] Subsequent quotations are from H. G. Wells, ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ and ‘The Diamond-Maker’, The Complete Short Stories of H. G Wells, ed. J. R. Hammond (London: Phoenix, 2000).

[18] Yorimitsi Hashimoto locates ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ among discourses surrounding the anarchist dynamite scare of the 1890s and the Fenian bombing campaign of the mid-1880s. See Yorimitsi Hashimoto, ‘Victorian Biological Terror: A Study of “The Stolen Bacillus”’, Undying Fire, 2 (2003), 3-27.

[19] This story also parodies the anarchist and Fenian scare stories of the 1880s and 1890s, several of which featured bomb factories concealed in lodging houses. For a discussion of the ‘dynamite novels’ of the 1880s and 1890s, see my Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). See also Alex Houen’s Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Barbara Arnett Melchiori’s Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985).

[20] A Modern Utopia, 25, 155.

[21] By stressing the importance of ‘Free Initiative’, anarchists sometimes mirrored their enemies, blurring the distinction between left wing radicalism and the politically conservative but economically radical methods of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. See Olivia Rossetti, ‘Methods of Propaganda’, The Torch 3.7, July 1893, 2; see also Helen Rossetti, ‘Cowardice’, The Torch 3.8 (August 1893), 5.

[22] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967).

[23] John Sweeney, At Scotland Yard: Being the Experiences During Twenty-Seven Years of Service by John Sweeney, Late Detective Inspector, Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard (London: Grant Richards, 1904), 312.

[24] Dryden, 173.

[25] Incendiarism also plays a key role in The History of Mr. Polly, ed. Simon J. James (London: Penguin, 2005). Dissatisfied and facing bankruptcy, the novel’s protagonist, Alfred Polly, opts out of bourgeois existence and breaks through the ‘paper walls of everyday circumstance’ (159) with equally cathartic violence. Escaping the constricting world of his parochial hometown of Fishbourne, Polly disappears after committing arson during an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The destructive, regenerative and political associations of fire are addressed in a number of works by Wells, including The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes, The War in the Air, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Shape of Things to Come.

[26] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 37.

[27] See H. G. Wells, ‘The Labour Unrest’, Daily Mail, 13-20 May, 1912, 13 May, 14-15. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

[28] ‘The Labour Unrest’, 15.

[29]Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (T. Fisher Unwin: London, 1896), v-vi.

[30] See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 2001), 141.

[31] Wells, A Modern Utopia, 14. In his 1907 book, New Worlds for Old, Wells dismissed anarchism as an ‘Eastern European gloss’ upon Marxism that neglected the ‘dusty effort’ needed to overthrow capitalism. Criticizing its theoretical extremism and ‘laissez-faire’ approach to revolution, he complained that it ignored the need for patient planning in the struggle against capitalism. Anarchism, ‘with its knife and bomb’, was a ‘perversion of the Socialist stream’, a political ‘miscarriage’ and ‘acephalous birth’ that would discredit socialism and distract public opinion. Wells accepted that the dismantling of the state was the ultimate and goal of socialism but the anarchists, he believed, denied the evolutionary nature of political change. Lacking practical experience, these insincere ‘Overmen’ were more concerned with acquiring power and ruling the world ‘by fraud or force’. Their ‘horrible’ goal of sudden revolutionary contrasted with the ‘faith and humility, truth and service’ offered by socialists believing in ‘work greater than themselves’. See New Worlds for Old (London: Macmillan, 1907), 236-7, 242.

[32] New Worlds for Old, 209. See also Martin Ray, ‘Conrad, Wells and The Secret Agent: Paying Old Debts and Settling New Scores’, Modern Language Review, 81 (1986), 560-73.

[33] Stover reads The Invisible Man as a work of political Darwinism that rejects capitalist and anarchist individualism and has much in common with Wells’s later Fabian novels. See Leon Stover, Science Fiction from Wells to Heinlein (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 32.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 734