The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  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 at this point. In the meantime, as Henfrey pretends to tinker with the clock, he looks up at Griffin and is promptly paralyzed by the sight of ‘the bandaged head and huge blue lenses staring fixedly’ at him: ‘It was so uncanny to Henfrey that for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another’ (12). In a double sense, the Invisible Man has a blank look.

  It is in this chapter that Mrs Hall too first intuits, in addition to his strangeness, the stranger’s monstrous blankness. On entering the parlour in order to warn her guest that the clock-mender is about to interrupt his privacy, she catches Griffin at a moment when, thinking himself alone, he has lowered the white cloth that covers his invisible mouth and chin. The room is dark, her eyes are dazzled by the lamp that she has just lit, and he quickly screens himself again; ‘but for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open – a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face’ (10).

  This terrifying, self-cannibalizing mouth is a fragment of infinity that takes a ravenous bite out of the everyday. Like the mouth in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, first painted in 1893, it threatens to contort or warp the world of which it is part (in Lacanian terms, it denotes the presence of the Real). The holes in Griffin’s bandaged head, like the ‘vast black eyes’ of the ‘huge, white heads’ about which Mrs Hall had dreamed one night, are portals or tunnels into the void (13). The bandages conceal nothing less than the Invisible Man’s non-being. Nothing less than nothing.

  Mr Cuss, the Iping village doctor, who is ‘devoured by curiosity’, according to the narrator, and consequently desperate to see what lies beneath the stranger’s bandages, is shocked to discover that nothing at all keeps the Invisible Man’s sleeve ‘up and open’: ‘There was nothing in it, I tell you.’ ‘I could see right down it to the elbow,’ he adds, ‘and there was a glimmer of light shining through a tear of the cloth’ (23). It is as if he fears that he will himself be devoured by this void. The vacant sleeve is a tear in the fabric of the universe.

  A couple of chapters later – in ‘The Unveiling of the Stranger’ – it becomes impossible for the inhabitants of Iping to suppress their glimpse into nothingness. Exasperated by Mrs Hall’s repeated complaints about his inexplicable activities, especially at night, Griffin resolves to shock both her and the other local people assembled in the public bar into silence: ‘Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity’ (33). He has removed his false nose.

  Performing a grotesque striptease, he takes off his disguise piece by piece – hat, spectacles, false hair, and bandages. ‘Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors – but nothing!’ The residents of Iping scramble to escape. ‘For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation was a solid, gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then – nothingness, no visible thing at all!’ (33). His entire head is a black cavity.

  Beneath the bandages and clothes that constitute the Invisible Man’s concession to the everyday functioning of symbolic reality in society there is only the void. There is nothing behind the veil of appearances. Once he has stripped naked in order to elude his pursuers, and so reduced himself to a ‘voice coming as if out of empty space’, it is only his speech that protects him and others from a direct, traumatic encounter with the emptiness of his being (35). With the Real.

  But, at the same time, this disembodied voice adverts to the empty space from which – as in the sound emanating from the recently invented phonograph – it appears to come. In Chapter 9, when Griffin first encounters the vagrant Thomas Marvel, a fellow itinerant or tramp whom he forces to become a reluctant sorcerer’s apprentice, the narrator refers to the Invisible Man throughout as ‘the Voice’. ‘The voice as a fetish object,’ the philosopher Mladen Dolar has written in an enigmatic but suggestive sentence, ‘consolidates on the verge of the void.’41 Or, as the narrator of The History of Mr Polly puts it, ‘on the verge of non-existence’.42

  At the end of the novel, shortly before Griffin’s gruesome demise, a rumour circulates through the countryside about a disembodied voice, heard by a couple of labourers, which ‘drove up across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the hills’: ‘It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it shouted’ (118). In this strange acoustic image, the Invisible Man’s voice seems to slide or dissolve into the void.

  It is probably in Chapter 9 – when, after escaping Iping, he recruits Marvel to assist him in his attempt merely to subsist or survive – that the reader of The Invisible Man starts to perceive Griffin not simply as someone to be feared but someone to be pitied.

  ‘I am just a human being – solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too,’ he appeals to the tramp, who is sitting beside a road on the South Downs contemplating his ill-fitting boots. ‘But I’m invisible’ (42). If his motives for persuading Marvel to help him are in one sense cynically self-serving, in another they are a matter of the most fundamental human survival. ‘I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent,’ he confesses (42).

  Griffin on the Downs thus echoes King Lear on the Heath. In Lear’s terms, the Invisible Man is ‘the thing itself’; ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’. He is ‘unaccommodated man’, like all those whom Shakespeare’s protagonist hails as having ‘houseless heads and unfed sides’.43 Griffin claims at least that the reason he stopped to communicate with Marvel, when he could have murdered him, is because he felt a sense of solidarity with his rootless condition: ‘“Here,” I said, “is an outcast like myself”’ (43). Both men, aimlessly travelling on foot, are fugitives from society.

  As the allusion to Shakespeare’s tragedy implies, the Invisible Man is portrayed more and more as a tragic anti-hero. The decisive shift from the farcical to the tragic, in Chapter 19, occurs when Griffin begins to narrate his past experiences to Kemp in his own voice. From this point, he is pitiful as well as both ludicrous and atrocious. Of course, when he confesses that he stole from his father in order to fund his necromantic research into invisibility, and that this precipitated his father’s suicide, it transmits a shock. But, if he appears to have been a sociopath during this period, his description of the emotional dissociation he experienced nonetheless elicits sympathy from the reader.

  He describes in Chapter 20 how, rousing himself from his obsessive scientific labours in order to attend his father’s miserable, shabby funeral, ‘I was like a man emerging from a thicket, and suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy’ (84). Here is Griffin, once again, as a Hollow Man; as someone whose capacity for feeling has been almost completely emptied out, someone whose humanity has been almost completely erased. It is not merely that his parent’s death, and the social rituals that commemorate it, seem meaningless; he himself, he intuits, is meaningless. The Invisible Man itself is in this sense not so much an unmeaning tragedy as a tragedy of unmeaning. A tragedy of meaning, and embodying, nothing.

  ‘He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man,’ Wells’s narrator later remarks of the Invisible Man (118). In Chapter 20, it is Griffin’s startling lack of sympathy, ironically, that secures the reader’s empathy. His apparently callous account of returning to his former home, his father’s house, in a ‘place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town’, is oddly moving (84). He is a casualty, here, of the relentless forces of capitalist modernization.

  Griffin is a man who, profoundly alienated from the everyday conditions of industrial capitalist society to which he feels condemned, in part because of the ‘frightful disadvantages’ under which he must pursue his unorthodox scientific research, is suffering from an acute state of anomie (82). ‘I remember myself as a gau
nt, black figure, going along the slippery, shiny side-walk, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place’ (84). This cold-blooded ‘black figure’, whose albino features have been obliterated by the gloom, is transformed soon after the funeral into an almost bloodless, transparent figure. Ingesting ‘drugs that decolourise blood’, he undergoes ‘a night of racking anguish’. Finally, he informs Kemp, ‘I became insensible, and woke languid in the darkness’ (89). It is an existential alchemy. Griffin’s insensibility, it might be said, in addition to his social nonentity, is the basis of his invisibility.

  Griffin’s identity as an outcast, which his temporary accommodation in an unfurnished room in a slum on Great Portland Street confirms, is dramatically reconfirmed as soon as he leaves this lodging once he has successfully conducted his experiment on himself. Naked on the muddy roads around Oxford Street, on a freezing cold January day, he first assumes the form of that poor, bare, forked animal which will later implore Marvel for assistance in the Sussex countryside. ‘I was now cruelly chilled,’ he explains to Kemp, ‘and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as I ran’ (93).

  Leaving the ‘ghost of a foot’ in the mud, feeling increasingly desperate, Griffin is chased through Bloomsbury in his bare feet by a group of inquisitive boys. Homeless, he is at the mercy of the elements and of the city’s hostility to outsiders: ‘My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, to get myself covered and warm, then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and bolted impregnably’ (96).

  So he conceals himself in a department store, Omniums on Tottenham Court Road, for the night. In the metropolis, there is no one to whom he can appeal for help. ‘I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke’ (96).

  The Invisible Man in effect converts the ‘terror and brutal cruelty’ that other pedestrians employ as a defensive strategy into his own offensive strategy. Later in his act of narration, which lasts for several chapters, Griffin announces to Kemp his intention of implementing a Reign of Terror, a ‘brutal dream of a terrorised world’ (115). Then, when he realizes that, even though he has taken his former friend into his confidence, Kemp has betrayed him to the police, he is forced to flee again. ‘He is mad,’ Kemp declares; ‘inhuman’ (113).

  It is Kemp who supervises the manhunt with which the narrative concludes. This professional scientist, the source of Griffin’s ressentiment, directs the police to ‘set a watch on trains and roads and shipping’ (113). And he issues a proclamation that presents the Invisible Man not simply as ‘a legend’ but ‘as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome’ (115). As the plot accelerates, mounted police enforce a curfew throughout the countryside. In a twenty-mile circle around Port Burdock, where Griffin is assumed to be in hiding, groups of ‘men armed with guns and bludgeons’ set out with dogs ‘to beat the roads and fields’ (116). The narrator refers to them as ‘men-hunters’; and he concludes with some compassion that, though Griffin was soon ‘active, powerful, angry and malignant again’, ‘he was a hunted man’ (118).

  According to the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, there are two kinds of manhunt, ‘a hunt of pursuit and a hunt of expulsion’, but these distinct operations have a complementary relationship: ‘hunting human beings, tracking them down, often presupposes that they have been previously chased out, expelled, or excluded from a common order.’44 The Invisible Man’s identity as the object of a manhunt that seeks to capture or kill him is predicated on his prior social exclusion – as an albino, as a dissident scientist, and as a sort of man without content.45

  For a time, the Invisible Man manages to reverse the apparently implacable logic of the manhunt. He besieges Kemp’s home in a bid for revenge, before chasing him through the countryside on foot. Sprinting desperately along the hill-roads, Kemp hears the ‘swift pad of his pursuer’ behind him (129). In the end, however, it is Griffin who is entrapped by his pursuers, even though at this point he remains invisible.

  The final chapter is entitled ‘The Hunter Hunted’. At the climax of the narrative, a ‘heap of struggling men’ consisting of navvies, police constables and a tram conductor savagely wrestles the invisible form of Griffin to the ground. ‘Kemp clung to him in front like a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands gripped, clutched, and tore at the unseen.’ Savagely beaten, and bleeding badly from a wound inflicted by a spade, the Invisible Man emits ‘a wild scream of “Mercy, mercy!” that died down swiftly to a sound like choking’ (130).

  At the culmination of this manhunt, a mob encircles ‘the thing unseen’, which is held fast by its ‘invisible arms’ and ‘invisible ankles’ (130). Griffin’s mouth, which Kemp feels with groping hands as he kneels beside him, is wet with blood: the Invisible Man is dying.

  Suddenly, an elderly woman screams and points; and, ‘faint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished,’ the people assembled perceive ‘the outline of a hand’. It becomes increasingly ‘clouded and opaque’. Then the rest of the Invisible Man’s body gradually materializes: ‘First came the little white nerves, 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’ (131).

  It is an eerie metamorphosis; a coming to life in death. The monstrous terrorist who has menaced the nation, as a tyrant both superhuman and subhuman, can finally be seen in his entirety, and in his humanity. ‘When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty’ (131). He really is nothing more than the poor, bare, forked creature he had claimed to be when he first encountered Marvel. Once he has been covered with a sheet, he is lifted from the ground and carried into a nearby pub. ‘And there, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, ended the strange experiment of the Invisible Man’ (131).

  In his sordidly commonplace experience of dying, this homeless, hunted, battered man is wholly emblematic of the ordinary humanity he dreamed of transcending. This is what Arnold Bennett meant when, in his review of Wells’s novel, he remarked that ‘the last few pages are deep tragedy, grotesque but genuine.’46

  The pathos of the painful process of becoming-human described in the final paragraphs of The Invisible Man is reinforced rather than undermined by his anomalous physical appearance: ‘His hair and brow were white – not grey with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism’ (131). His albino features signify, as we have seen, his outsider status, but at the Invisible Man’s death they are also symbolic of a redemptive purity. Indeed, as his age and his ‘broken body’ indicate, Griffin is implicitly Christ-like at the end.

  ‘Cover his face!’ a nameless man cries out after he has died, in a revealing addition Wells made to the first American and second British editions of The Invisible Man, both published in 1897. The man’s exclamation is an attempt to shield the children present from the ghastly expression of ‘anger and dismay’ that contorts the dead man’s features (131). But it also echoes the scene in St Mark’s Gospel when, after Christ’s arrest and shortly before his crucifixion, the high priest of the Sanhedrin pronounces him guilty and rends his clothes: ‘And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him’ (Mark 14:63, 65).

  Here, Christ is performing the ancient role of the scapegoat: the deformed, polluted creature that is sacrificed in order ritually to cleanse and purify the community from which it has been expelled. Griffin too performs the tragic role of society’s scapegoat. ‘The whole point of the scapegoat’, Eagleton has insisted, ‘is its anonymity, as a human being emptied of subjectivity and reduced to refuse or nothingness.’47 The Invisible Man – who aspired to a state of nothingness, in the form of invisibility, and has been reduced to nothingness, as his shabby death indicates – is preci
sely this human being emptied of subjectivity. His social function at the end of the narrative is to constitute the non-being that symbolically secures the community’s sense of belonging. In an atomized industrial society defined by what he had referred to as ‘sordid commercialism’, Griffin’s identity as an alien is in the end the precondition for a renewed sense of social cohesion (84).

  Like Dracula, then, and like Frankenstein’s demon, the Invisible Man ‘serves to displace the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society outside society itself’, to adapt Franco Moretti’s formulation. ‘Professing to save the individual,’ Moretti continues, the society that destroys the monster ‘in fact annuls him’.48 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.

  In ‘The First Wells’ (1946), an essay by Jorge Luis Borges on ‘the excellence of Wells’s first novels’, the ones written before he ‘resigned himself to the role of a sociological spectator’, the great Argentine modernist insisted that ‘not only do they tell an ingenious story but they tell a story symbolic of processes that are somehow inherent in all human destinies.’ Borges singled out The Invisible Man as especially important among these scientific romances.49

  Above all, Borges seems to have valued this novel for its evocation of the individual’s fundamental emptiness, futility and isolation. Although he misremembered its details slightly, he summarized the novel in these haunting terms: ‘The harassed invisible man who has to sleep as though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light is our solitude and our terror.’50 Almost forty years later, in 1985, not long before his death, Borges reaffirmed that ‘Wells’s fictions were the first books that [he] read’, and concluded his reflections on The Invisible Man in these terms: ‘In Wells, the poignant is as important as the fabulous. His invisible man is a symbol – one that will last a long time – of our solitude.’51