Chapter 2: Epistemological Crises in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897)
Only two years later, Wells writes another narrative featuring an epistemological crises caused by the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man. Griffin, who refers to himself as an “experimental investigator,” tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. Thus, the epistemological crisis H.G. Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors. This second chapter will explore, in a similar manner to the last, how both the premise of the narrative and the way that premise plays out challenges the assumption that seeing is knowing, that observation produces an accurate representation of reality.
Most of the novel features Griffin bitterly battling ignorant villagers who want to arrest him, and the reason the peasants Griffin loathes so much are unenlightened is because they cannot bring themselves to mistrust or question their senses. They come up with all sorts of more rational explanations for his “appearance” – that he is in a disguise, that he is racially “black,” that he has some sort of skin disease that makes him marbled black and white, that he was in a horrible accident and needs to cover his body in bandages, etc. - as opposed to questioning their ability to “see” and subsequently acknowledging that it is within the realm of possibility that Griffin is invisible. His invisibility – the fact that they cannot see him – would mean that he is not there, so they must rationalize his strange appearance, which in fact is a lack of appearance, in some other way.
When Griffin reveals himself, they experience the uncanny sensation of “the strangest thing in the world” when they hear a voice coming out of an “empty space,” when in fact the space is not empty, but occupied by Griffin’s body. The act of seeing in this case is unreliable because even though no one can actually see Griffin, this does not mean that he is not there, does not mean that they cannot know him. Victorian writer Walter Pater, from whom both Levines draw many of their ideas about realism in Victorian literature, claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not equate knowing, but in fact displaces knowledge or obscures it. The peasants of The Invisible Man fail to understand that even though they see an empty space, that space is not necessarily empty, and this perfectly proves Pater’s point.
On the other hand, The Invisible Man also supports John Ruskin’s more traditionally cited realist notion that imagination is a faulty sense of sight, and that a representation that looks to be an accurate representation – unideal and unimaginative – is realist and therefore preferable. The peasants plotting against Griffin use only their imaginations and not their powers of reason and observation to reproduce Griffin to each other verbally. The narrator says, for instance, “Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives.” This use of imagination to inaccurately represent someone makes Mr. Gould and the other townspeople fools; the peasant readings of Griffin will strike readers as laughable, therefore locating them in a realist role, scoffing at the anti-realists. And this positioning of the reader as a participant (or a better participant than Mr. Gould) within a realist project occurs despite the narrative, in its premise, being a supernatural and uncanny tale. That is, the reader knows that invisible men aren’t possible outside of the novel, but he or she still stands as superior to the townspeople who, in relying on their overactive imaginations, do not know how to properly enact realism.
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