Wells’s new subject, yet another self-portrait in a distorting mirror, appears in the second fiction in this volume.
The Invisible Man
uses yet another obsessed man of science, but this time Wells toys with the idea of plausibility. That is, Griffin, the invisible man, explains how he is able to capitalize on his own albinism to reduce the amount of light his body reflects to the point where human eyes cannot see him. It would almost seem as though Wells were succumbing to Jules Verne’s notion of plausibility, but we quickly realize this is not the case. Griffin’s albinism (pp.172—173) is merely the outward sign of his difference from others, a difference we might suppose to be quantitative—some people are lighter-skinned than others—but which turns out to be qualitative. What separates Griffin from the rest of humanity is exactly the element that separates Wells’s early version of the Time Traveller from the rest of humanity: genius.
But genius is intoxicating. It sends the ego into raptures of self-delight and isolates the individual further and further from anything like a human community. This is the tale Wells spins out in The Invisible Man: the gradual metamorphosis of genius into madness. Again, this is not a unique story. The Romantics, especially William Wordsworth (1770—1850) in his poem “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a, Yew Tree” (1795), explore this very theme, while Wells’s model, Mary Shelley, provides him with the nucleus of his novel—the solitary scientist, the potentially dangerous invention pursued for egotistical purposes.
So
The Invisible Man
is a cautionary tale the author writes for his generation and for himself. When we forget that we too are merely human, when we take ourselves to be something like gods because we can do things ordinary people cannot do, we run the risk of regarding our neighbors with contempt. Wells transfers the role of outsider, which Romanticism had created for the artist, to the scientist in order to show that the truly innovative force in modern society would derive not from humanists but from those trained in science. The retrograde force in society, as Wells preached throughout his life—the mockery of Greek studies in chapter I (p. 7) of
The Time Machine
is a gentle harbinger of this notion—is the diligent but useless study of dead languages that have no bearing on modern culture. The gap between scientists and humanists persists in our own age, as evidenced by C.P. Snow’s 1959 pamphlet “The Two Cultures,” which shows scientists to be second-class citizens in a society dominated by humanists.
Wells’s ideas about society and the relationship between the scientist and the community remain constant throughout his career, but his literary style does not. The style of
The Time Machine
is essayistic: Wells leaves his characters and setting so abstract that there is little chance his readers will feel any genuine affinities or antipathies for them. Even his vocabulary is limited, with the word “incontinent” (in its various forms) repeated so often we begin to wonder if it might be some sort of obsession.
The Invisible Man
appeared in 1897, only two years after
The Time Machine,
but the thirty-three-year-old author had become a vastly different man. In the two years between these two novels, Wells produced a prodigious quantity of work:
The Wonderful Visit, Select Conversations with an Uncle,
and
The Stolen Bacillus
in 1895, then
The Island of Doctor Moreau
and
The Wheels of Chance
in 1896—three novels and two collections of shorter works. The important change here is Wells’s decision to write other kinds of works and not limit himself to fantasy. The
Wheels of Chance
capitalizes on the bicycling craze and allows the author to recreate oral speech patterns, especially his own Cockney accent. This would cause reviewers to link him to Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who turned lower-class Londoners into picturesque types.
We see the effect of so much writing experience the moment we open
The Invisible Man.
Mrs. Hall, the landlady of the Coach and Horses Inn in Iping, where Griffin, the Invisible Man, sets up his makeshift laboratory, comes alive as a human presence when she muses on her nephew’s accident:
There was my sister’s son, Tom, jest cut his arm with a scythe, tumbled on it in the ‘ayfield, and bless me! he was three months tied up, sir. You’d hardly believe it. It’s regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir (p.95).
Mrs. Hall’s comic fretting is only marginally related to the story of the Invisible Man, but her language in its sheer ordinariness renders the fiction much more terrifying. That is, we have the linguistic reality of late-nineteenth-century London invaded by the bizarre: The real world is now Wells’s setting, and he invades it with all the violence of the Martians in
The War of the Worlds,
which he would publish in 1898. This is one of Wells’s most important innovations: The reader need not be transported to the future or to Dr. Moreau’s island laboratory, where evolution is accelerated by science. Now the fantastic strides through the front door of the reader’s house in the form of the Invisible Man.
This technique of making the real world strange also reappears in Wells’s narrator. Unlike Hillyer, the witness-narrator in
The Time Machine,
the narrator here shifts ambiguously from being an omniscient third-person narrator in true novelistic style to being a reporter. For example, chapter XI (p.136) begins in an explanatory mode: “Now in order clearly to understand what had happened in the inn, it is necessary to go back to the moment when Mr. Marvel first came into view of Mr. Huxter’s window.” The narrator here is in full command of the facts and uses his knowledge to inform the reader. At other times, the narrator leaves much to our imagination:
The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house in a state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can imagine him.... (opening of chapter XXVI, p. 207).
This change of focus reflects the reader’s changing perception of the Invisible Man. We are simultaneously sympathetic to his situation and horrified at the way he can sacrifice a cat (p. 176) to science with no thought of its suffering or steal money entrusted to his father, thus forcing the old man to commit suicide (p. 173). The rambling autobiographical sketch he gives to Kemp (chapters XVII—XXIV) shows him to be more brilliant than the unimaginative Kemp but also unscrupulous, egotistical, and, finally, tyrannical. Mad, either from ingesting chemicals or from the sense of power invisibility confers, Griffin has, as Kemp says, “cut himself off from his kind” (p. 209). He becomes a superman but one who seeks to bend society to his will.
The ending of
The Invisible Man
is charged with pathos. Surrounded, he is kicked to death (pp. 222-223) by workmen who are afraid and as indifferent to the marvelous fact of Griffin’s invisibility as the Eloi are to the presence of the Time Traveller. He even begs for mercy, something he himself is incapable of bestowing. But here Wells, just as he did in
The Time Machine,
when the Time Traveller disappears perhaps to return at another time, leaves a thread behind: The Invisible Man’s diaries, useless in the ignorant hands of the drunken Mr. Marvel, may fall into the hands of another scientist, one who may use invisibility as a means to change the world.
Alfred Mac Adam,
a professor at Barnard College—Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984 and 2002, Mac Adam was the editor of
Review: Latin American Literature and Arts,
a publication of the Americas Society.
The Time Machine
AN INVENTION
I
THE TIME TRAVELLER (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite
a
matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver
b
caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents,
1
embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forennger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it:) and his fecundity.
c
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness
nil,
has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”
“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
2
“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”
“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—”
“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an
instantaneous
cube exist?”
“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”
3
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in
four
directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”
“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; “that ... very clear indeed.”
“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession
d
of cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time.
There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?”
“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why
three
dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?”
“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
4
“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.”
“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, “if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”
The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”