Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2010 September 15 • Wednesday

"Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations."

—H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, 1897

The first page of Chapter Three tells us that the Invisible Man arrived in Iping Village "on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw". Placing the arrival of such an unusual person on such an usual day, Leap Year's Day, is a nice touch. The strangeness of the day underscores the strangeness of the visitor.

Unfortunately, the first page of the book tells us that "The stranger came early in February, one wintry day". Which is it? The Leap Year date is supported by a statement in Chapter Four, in which villagers are speculating that the stranger is fleeing a crime he might have committed "dating from the middle or end of February".

And another question: who is telling this story? The really invisible man here is the narrator. It would be easy not to notice, but the story is told in the first person singular. I think the beginning of Chapter Four is when the mysterious narrator first allows us to hear him (or her).

Another thing that might not be immediately apparent is how ordinary the Invisible Man's invisibility is at first. That is, he's invisible in the same way most of us are all the time, by being in a different room or behind a closed door.

At the end of the first chapter the Invisible Man has shut himself into the parlour of the Coach and Horses, and "a curious listener might have heard him at the coals, and for the space of five minutes he was audible pacing the room. He seemed to be talking to himself. Then the armchair creaked as he sat down again".

In this scene and in many others the Invisible Man is heard but not seen, in just the same way everybody is, every day. We can all be invisible to some extent, so why does the Invisible Man become a monster? It seems the problem is not so much that others can't see you but that you can't see yourself. (The main character is Kaoru Abe's Face of Another has a similar problem.)

The tone of the book for the first seven chapters is almost entirely comic. The last line of the seventh chapter, though—"But Jaffers lay quite still, face upward and knees bent"—changes the tone dramatically.

This signals more or less the end of a first act. The second act continues to be amusing but with a definite edge. The third and final act is almost pure horror, with only the occasional wry aside. (The book's progression, from benign to malign, mirrors that of its title character. Horror is also more effective if some humor is or has been present.).

Nabokov admired H. G. Wells and I wonder if Wells's delusional villain inspired some of Nabokov's delusional villains. The Nabokov villain frequently overestimates his own power, and Nabokov will subtly signal the error to the reader with a casual line or phrase here or there.

Wells does the same thing at the end of Chapter Nine, when the Invisible Man conscripts the service of Mr. Marvel (one of many interesting names in this book). "'You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power.' He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently."

Yes, he's so powerful that he can't even wear clothing, and now he's got a cold!

H. G. Wells wrote a great short story called "The Country of the Blind", in which the only sighted person in a world of blind people finds himself to be not king, but the lowliest, least advantaged citizen of the society.

When the Invisible Man first ventures out onto the streets of London, he also finds himself surprisingly disadvantaged in this "city of the blind". Nobody can see him, so nobody tries to avoid him and he's constantly being jostled and trod upon and even hit by a basket of soda-water syphons. Even walking is difficult for him since he cannot see his feet.

The third act begins with Chapter Seventeen: "Doctor Kemp's Visitor". Kemp looks out the window and gives us what seems to be an interior view of H. G. Wells. "After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Doctor Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled the window down again, and returned to his writing desk."

Later on in the same chapter Kemp encounters the Invisible Man, learns that he is his old schoolmate Griffin, and supposes that Griffin achieves the effect of invisibility by hypnosis, since invisibility is impossible. Of course this is exactly the trick Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, would be using a few decades later.

There are some memorable scenes in a department store, one of my favorite locations. If somebody hasn't yet written a monograph on the department store in Western fiction, maybe I'll do it myself. Subjects could include Thorne Smith's The Night Life of the Gods, John Collier's story "Evening Primrose", the "Death at Bargain Prices" episode of The Avengers and perhaps the apotheosis of the subgenre, James Gould Cozzens's Castaway, which Sam Peckinpah apparently wanted to film but ended up doing Straw Dogs instead.

In movies you can have Mannequin, of course, and the last word on the subject, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (though shopping malls are not quite department stores).