The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  It is finally not impossible that West’s surname – in addition to its invocation of the pioneer spirit – has a symbolic resonance that has since been lost. In an item entitled ‘A Missing Preacher’, printed three days after Ansel Bourne’s disappearance in 1887, the Providence Bulletin reported that he ‘may have started for the West’. ‘Bourne’s fugue,’ Lieberman comments in light of the newspaper’s speculation, ‘was an extreme form of self-liberty; it was the great escape: going West, finding a new life unfettered by the chains of the past – even if that past included personal identity and its constitutive memories.’48

  To ‘Go West’ in this new context, then, would be to escape the limits of individualism, to contest the boundaries of singular consciousness, to conquer the divide between life and death. … Unable to cope with his own world, he takes flight into the alternate reality of another man.49

  In his utopian fugue, Bellamy’s protagonist also redefines what it means to ‘Go West’. He does so in the language of socialism, a language that fits the longings of modern man. He too escapes the limits of individualism, contests the boundaries of singular consciousness, and conquers the divide between life and death. In Boston’s utopian future – the alternative reality to which, unable to cope with his own world, West abruptly takes flight – he too finds a new life unfettered by the chains of the past.

  So, what conclusions can be inferred from the comparison I have drawn between the utopian imagination and fugue in the 1880s?

  First, I think, that utopian fiction becomes more sophisticated at this time because it is shaped by contemporaneous developments in psychology, which enable Bellamy in particular to rethink the mental or existential processes that time travelling, or social dreaming, entail.50 In rethinking these processes, he imparts a psychological depth to the utopian form that makes it difficult to dismiss Looking Backward as a paper-thin romance redeemed only by its political importance. Instead, in this utopia, psychopathology is placed – to take a formulation from Fredric Jameson – ‘in the service of collective drama’.51

  Second, that in the late nineteenth century, utopianism cannot be dismissed as escapism, as its detractors have reflexively insisted. For it is more accurately a form of escape, a flight from the present that, far from leaving it intact or even reinforcing its limits, as escapism does, challenges its ontological unity. If one can meaningfully inhabit two selves, then perhaps one can meaningfully inhabit two histories.

  This appears to be Morris’s conviction at the conclusion of News from Nowhere, when his protagonist Guest reluctantly fades back into the nineteenth century from which he had fled in his dream. ‘Or indeed was it a dream?’ he asks, as he lies in bed in his house in Hammersmith. ‘If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?’52 He is cursed, or blessed, with a double consciousness, one that makes him half an inhabitant of the future, necessarily, as he fights for social revolution in the present. Utopia is from this perspective no more a non-place than the alternative identity inhabited by a fugueur is a state of non-being; it is simply an alternative political consciousness.

  In a discussion of The Time Machine, Robert Philmus has commented that ‘Wells designed the fiction to be precisely what its title says it is: a time machine – i.e., a vehicle for transporting its readers … outside their “temporal” mindset so that they might examine assumptions which they – and human beings as a rule – tend to accept unthinkingly because those assumptions ordinarily remain unconscious.’53 Looking Backward is in this respect a time machine too; and a space machine – though its travels are in inner space.

  Like all late nineteenth-century utopian and science fiction, it is a machine for displacing the reader’s political imagination, and for putting consciousness to flight. In Bellamy’s hands, utopian fiction effectively becomes an ‘art of the fugue’.54

  4

  Fleeing

  H. G. Wells’s

  The Invisible Man

  ‘The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,’ comments one character as the forces of justice close in on the fugitive known as the Invisible Man: ‘He has cut himself off from his kind.’1 H. G. Wells’s fourth novel, The Invisible Man (1897), is a strange tragicomedy that describes the apparently inexorable process whereby its hero, or anti-hero, a bitter but brilliant scientist called Griffin, who has invented an ingenious means of rendering himself invisible, aspires initially to superhuman status, but collapses finally into an abject, subhuman state.

  The Invisible Man, a criminal condemned to fleeing his pursuers on foot, whether they take the form of an urban mob or an armed police battalion, is another exemplary instance – like the Man of the Crowd, and like many of the other figures reconstructed in this book – of a casualty of modernity who is forced to negotiate his outsider status in part through the politics and semiotics of walking. Chased through the streets of London, where he is reduced to a state of homelessness, pursued along the lanes and roads of southern England, the Invisible Man becomes a scapegoat who must bear the sins of the society from which he has been excluded.

  For Griffin, imperceptible both to the traffic on the roads and the pedestrians bustling about their everyday business on the pavements, the city streets become a battlefield through which, in order to protect himself, he must carefully plot his route. ‘I walked to avoid being overtaken,’ he observes at one point, in his retrospective narrative of events. ‘Every crossing was a danger, every passenger a thing to watch alertly’ (101). If, in the first instance, invisibility offered the sort of social privileges associated with flânerie, promising to fulfil certain voyeuristic pleasures with impunity, then soon enough it proves far from liberating. In the form of the Invisible Man, the flâneur finds himself brutally excluded from the urban space to which he assumed he had unlimited access.

  A physicist and former chemist, Griffin is no more than ‘a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college’ when he first apprehends that it might be possible to make the ‘whole fabric’ of his body, including in the end his blood, completely colourless and transparent (83). As he himself points out, he is ‘almost an albino’, ‘with a pink and white face and red eyes’, and this lack of skin pigmentation makes it easier for him to decolourize his tissues (71): ‘“I could be Invisible,” I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge’ (83).

  In addition, Griffin’s albinism reinforces his embattled sense of being a social outsider. In the nineteenth century, after all, albinos were exhibited at carnivals and fairs, and classed among degenerates. They were for example among the ‘living curiosities’ displayed by P. T. Barnum in North America and Britain from the late 1850s to the early 1890s. ‘What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!’ Herman Melville had exclaimed in Moby Dick (1851) – ‘this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.’2 Because of his albinism the Invisible Man is already cut off from his kind.

  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’.3 In this respect, his spiritual condition anticipates that of the eponymous character of Wells’s later novel The History of Mr Polly (1910), who hates ‘the whole scheme of life’, which he regards as ‘at once excessive and inadequate of him’; and who consequently falls, each day, ‘into a violent rage and hatred against the outer world’.4 But Griffin is far more malicious than Mr Polly; he is sociopathic. At
one point, in order to fund his research, he steals from his own father, who then kills himself because he is secretly in debt.

  Like the Underground Man in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), the Invisible Man is a sick, spiteful individual who derives a perverse strength from what the former describes as ‘the poison of unfulfilled wishes that have turned inwards’.5 But if Griffin internalizes his unfulfilled wishes he also externalizes and, in effect, sublimates them. He alchemizes the poison. Frustrated in his professional ambitions, Griffin ‘find[s] compensation in an imaginary revenge’, to frame it in terms of Nietzsche’s formulation – his dream of becoming an invisible Übermensch.6

  After discovering ‘a general principle of pigments and refraction’, Griffin devotes himself to his obsessive scientific labours in the laboratory he has surreptitiously set up in a cheap apartment in central London; and devises an elaborate method that makes it possible, ‘without changing any other property of matter,’ as he puts it in his retrospective narrative, ‘to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air – so far as all practical purposes are concerned’ (80).7 ‘Wounded by the world’, the Invisible Man thus sets out to dominate it through his command of experimental science, and so to make himself one of the ‘masters of the world’.8

  Once he has performed the painful metamorphosis that follows his secretive experiments, Griffin gives full expression to his contempt for ‘the common conventions of humanity’ and the ‘common people’ who embody them (104). Inspired by his ressentiment, the Invisible Man’s vengeful and destructive actions, which culminate in his announcement that he will launch a Reign of Terror, ensure that he quickly becomes universally feared. He proclaims ‘the Epoch of the Invisible Man’, while rumours of his terroristic campaign spread across the nation (119).

  In this respect, he is a precursor to Rud, the protagonist of The Holy Terror (1939), Wells’s later, comparatively underrated novel about the rise and fall of a totalitarian dictator in England, who is told by his intellectual mentor that ‘to make a new world, the leader must be a fundamentally destructive man, a recklessly destructive man.’ At the same time, though, this leader must cultivate a superior attitude to the common people and maintain a certain mysterious distance from them, thereby acting the part of ‘an invisible Great Man’.9 Griffin, like Rud, is a Holy Terror: ‘He dreams of a reign of terror!’ (113).

  In response to the Invisible Man’s attempt to implement this terroristic dream, the police impose ‘a stringent state of siege’ across an area of several hundred square miles surrounding the place in the countryside to which he has fled (116). But it comes too late for one man ‘of inoffensive habits and appearance’, whom in ‘a murderous frenzy’ Griffin beats to death with an iron rod: ‘He stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled him, and smashed his head to a jelly’ (116). This is not the ‘judicious slaying’ Griffin boasted of making when he insisted on establishing his Reign of Terror; it is a ‘wanton killing’ (110). If he is sociopathic, he is almost psychopathic too. Even the insane moral code to which this monomaniac adheres has collapsed.

  Having been driven outside the city’s boundaries, the Invisible Man is hunted through the surrounding countryside and brutally killed. This is, in effect, a sacrificial ritual of social purification collectively performed by the community. The novel’s protagonist, or antagonist, fulfils the classic function of the scapegoat, whom Terry Eagleton categorizes, in his study of tragedy, as ‘a holy terror’, a ‘guilty innocent’.10 ‘As if by irresistible gravitation towards the unpleasant,’ explained one of Wells’s most appreciative contemporaries, the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead, when he came to recapitulate its remorseless plot, ‘the invisible man passes through a series of disastrous experiences, until finally he goes mad and is beaten to death as the only way of putting an end to a homicidal maniac with the abnormal gift of invisibility.’11

  If the reader, like Stead, recognizes the inevitability of the Invisible Man’s sacrifice, they ultimately feel a certain compassion for him too. Fear and hatred of the scapegoat, as expressed by the characters he encounters in the course of his flight, are in the end transformed by his death into pity; and this identification with the scapegoat, in Eagleton’s formulation, ultimately articulates ‘horror not of it but of the social order whose failure it signifies’.12

  Like the pioneering science fictions that Wells published before and after it, The Invisible Man exploited topical scientific debate as the basis for an enduring myth about the moral and social consequences of those Promethean aspirations that, at both an individual and collective level, were shaping and reshaping industrial capitalist society. In his review in the Bookman, Clement Shorter recognized this when he pointed to the grim ‘pessimism’ permeating its moral claim that, as he put it in deliberately understated tones, ‘scientific experiment never makes the world any better or happier.’ He also observed, with considerable relish, that Wells writes ‘horrible little stories about monsters’.13

  The Invisible Man is, in the first instance, a critique of scientism (as the late nineteenth-century conviction that scientific method alone holds the key 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 in 1895 accidentally discovered X-rays, sometimes known at this time as the ‘photography of the invisible’.14 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.15

  To appropriate Marx’s allegorical image of the bourgeois class itself in the nineteenth century, he resembles ‘the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells’.16 A descendent of the scientist at the centre of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), then, like his close cousins the Time Traveller and Dr Moreau, Wells’s anti-hero is thus a distinctly ‘Modern Prometheus’.17

  If Wells’s novel is a critique of scientism, it is also an anatomy of power, especially in the conditions of industrial and metropolitan modernity. At the moment the Invisible Man first grasps a scientific means of altering the refractive index of his body’s fabric in order to make it completely transparent, he glimpses ‘a magnificent vision of all that Invisibility might mean to a man. The mystery, the power, the freedom’ (83). The Invisible Man’s dream of escaping both the social and technical constraints of his time and the limits of the human form itself, in pursuit of an impossible power and freedom, is of course an ancient one.

  John Sutherland, who has pointed to the plentiful presence of ‘the invisibility motif’ in popular literature of the nineteenth century, especially ghost stories and what he calls ‘elixir vitae fantasies’, notes that the ‘primeval origins’ of the Invisible Man plot ‘are buried deep in pre-literate myth and infantile fantasies of omnipotence’.18 It is a staple feature of fairy tales, such as Jack the Giant-Killer, as well as of Greek legends, including the story of Perseus, who uses the helmet of invisibility given him by Athena in order to elude the vengeful Gorgons after he has killed their sister Medusa. But as a means of anatomizing power – both its dynamics and its ethics – the invisibility motif also has an ancient literary and philosophical provenance.

  ‘An Invisible Man is a man of power,’ Griffin states at one point (43). In composing The Invisible Man, Wells undoubtedly recalled an important episode in Plato’s Republic, a philosophical work that acted, he later said, as ‘a very releasing book indeed for my mind’ when he first encountered it as an adolescent in the early 1880s.19 In Book II of the Republic, Glaucon recounts the legend of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring, in order to argue that if an individual suddenly acquires the gift of invisibility, and in effect becomes free to act with impunity, he will
be unable to resist the temptation to ‘go about among men with the powers of a god’.20 Here, more explicitly than in other ancient versions of the legend, the metaphorical value of invisibility pivots on the moral implications of using and abusing power.

  In The Invisible Man Wells was probably also thinking of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (c.1594), which at one point presents something like a dramatization of Glaucon’s provocative claim. There, Faustus impishly abuses the Pope and his Cardinals after Mephistophilis has rendered him invisible. ‘Sweet Mephistophilis,’ Faustus cajoles his master, ‘so charm me here / That I may walk invisible to all, / And do what e’er I please unseen of any.’21 Here, in a sense, is the apotheosis of the Baudelairean flâneur, whose passion is ‘to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world’. In Baudelaire’s words, he is ‘a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito’.22

  As this reference to Baudelaire intimates, Wells deliberately embedded this Faustian dream of freedom, mobility and divine potency in the specific conditions of industrial and metropolitan capitalist society at the end of the nineteenth century. For, in attempting to emancipate himself from his physical form, Griffin presses to an apparently utopian extreme the social or spiritual condition that Georg Simmel, identifying the individual’s attempt to preserve their autonomy ‘in the face of overwhelming social forces’ as the central challenge of ‘modern life’, classified in terms of the ‘intellectualistic’ mentality characteristic of the metropolis:23

  The metropolitan type of man – which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants – develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. … Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life.24