In the last century, science fiction and fantasy had taken off into a new world of impossibility. Themes such as time travel and invisibility were thoroughly established in the literary genre, but have yet to be realized in real life. Despite the lack of absolute scientific verity, stories about such topoi stimulate the imagination. In his novel The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells takes the magical idea of invisibility and transforms it into a more realistic, tangible science. In turn, the heritage of invisibility as a scientific theme has led to the genesis of such popular-cultural myths as the Philadelphia Experiment, an allegedly scientifically-driven attempt to achieve a certain degree of invisibility.
But there is more than one type of invisibility in literature, and structural analysis is useful in sorting them out. A.J. Greimas, in his book Structural Semantics, provides a method for description of signification by dichotomy. Structuralist thought calls for a framework made of binary opposites, and invisibility is a framework replete with these opposites. Invisibility can obviously be literal, whose opposite would be a sheer metaphor for some social or philosophical condition. It can belong as a “natural” property to an imaginary being--an alien, god, or spirit, perhaps--or it can be artificially created or engineered by mortal human characters. Such invisibility can in turn be produced through sheer magic or by scientific inventiveness such as with modern chemical or electronic technology. The ability to remain undetected can be either temporary or permanent, and more specifically, sartorial or bodily. Through these categories runs a common thread of physics and optics. Whether vision is obstructed or subject to illusions, invisibility is always a challenge to the human perception.
Literal invisibility in literature involves the inability of certain characters to see one another using normal vision. This may include camouflage, masking, the manipulation of a perceiver’s mind, or some natural propensity owing to spiritual forces or conditions. Many myths and legends hinge on such kinds of literal invisibility. Greek mythology attributes invisibility to gods and goddesses. In Book XII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the goddess Diana gives a figural invisibility by “cast[ing] a veil of cloud over the eyes of the assembled company” in order to substitute a stag for the maiden Iphigenia during a sacrifice. In the Aeneid, Opis uses a storm to escape detection. As Virgil says, “The goddess spoke, and Opis, veiled in a dark storm, glided lightly down through the breezes of the sky, whirring as she flew.” From Ovid and Virgil it is evident that the method of creating invisibility is by divine obstruction of the observer’s view instead of bodily affecting the subject herself. Medieval German folklore carries on the idea of invisibility as something supernatural and naturally predisposed in spirit existence. A doppelgänger, a spirit double that is said to exist for every man, bird, or beast, is an exact and usually invisible replica of its match. The myth also includes the belief that to meet one’s double is a sign of one’s own impending death. Another Germanic mythological being capable of invisibility is the Nix, or Nixy. This mermaid lives in a beautiful underwater palace and meets humans by transforming into forms such as a fair maiden or old woman, or by making itself actually invisible. From the sixth to thirteenth centuries, several folk tales circulated mentioning an invisible smith. The story of Wayland (or Weland) the Smith, sometimes called a lord of the elves, has appeared in Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon legends. One of these legends is documented in the poem Völundarkvida in the 13th-century Icelandic Elder. Wayland’s literal invisibility fits in the category of those supernatural beings who have various other magical powers. Other accounts of Wayland the Smith are written in the 13th-century Icelandic prose Thidriks saga, the Anglo-Saxon poems “Waldere” and “Deor,” in Beowulf, and in Alfred the Great’s 9th-century notes in his translation of Boëthius. While some versions dwell on Wayland’s ability to escape the king’s smith by magical flight, an English tradition tells of a haunted stone burial chamber near Berkshire known as Wayland’s Smith. The legend is that the invisible smith who haunts the chamber will shoe a horse for a traveler if a coin is left on a stone and the traveler does not try to watch the work in progress. Germany, Denmark, and Belgium have similar traditional stories. Minor deities, spirits, and demigods who are by nature invisible indeed abound in pagan European folklore.
In Jewish and Christian mythology, such natural invisibility of course characterizes God Himself. Christian Scripture, as well as its long tradition of commentary, focuses on the literal invisibility of God as a signal of His ineffability and omnipotence. Referring to Moses, Hebrews 11:27 says that Moses “persevered because he saw Him who is invisible.” There is ample evidence in Scripture that belief in God is by faith, since He is not physically present. When He appears visibly, it is through other physical means. In Bible stories, he reveals himself to Moses in a burning bush, to Jacob in a dream about a ladder, and to disciples through tongues of fire. Thus it could be said that the literally invisible God shows Himself through figural visibility. The natural and permanent invisibility of God is contrary to the artificial invisibility of someone with sartorial invisibility, which is temporary. Ancient Christian art often portrays an empty throne on which might lay a book or folded purple robe to symbolize the invisible presence of God. Not only is divine invisibility important in scared literature, it is crucial in sacred art as well.
On the opposite end of the structural spectrum to literal invisibility both permanent and temporary, both spiritually imbued and artificially bestowed, lies the sense of the “invisible” as a purely metaphorical or allegorical value. The social condition of some marginal group of people can be likened to “invisibility,” producing not so much a fictional tale in which someone cannot actually be seen by others but a tale in which persons choose not to “see” or recognize those who are marginal, outcast, undesirable. The best-known portrayal of such social invisibility is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which obviously plays off of the title of Wells’ famous science fiction novel. The invisibility of African-Americans and other minority groups has become an extensively-researched topic. In this novel, the unnamed hero searches for his own identity in a white racist society hostile to African-Americans. Ellison thus allegorizes and expands Wells’ Invisible Man into a crucial social issue for American identity.
Earlier poets did not connect invisibility with social
issues, but their attempts to portray invisibility reflect the beginnings
of a refined understanding of the topic. Gotthold Lessing in his book Laocoon
devotes a whole theoretical chapter—the first of its kind—to the topic
of putatively figural or metaphorical invisibility in Homer. Lessing
points
out that “when in the confusion of battle one of the chief heroes becomes
exposed to a danger from which nothing short of divine aid can save him,
the poet makes his guardian deity veil him in a thick cloud or in darkness,
and lead him from the field.” An example of this is when Aphrodite
“caught up Paris easily, since she was divine, and wrapped him in a thick
mist and set him down again in his own perfumed bedchamber.”
Similarly, Phoibos Apollo wraps Hektor in thick mist to hide him from Achilleus.
In another instance, Poseidon “drifted a mist across the eyes of [Achilleus].”
According to Lessing, this type of invisibility is not quite even a camouflage.
The key is not in the thick mist or cloud,
" …but in the god’s swift withdrawal of the imperilled [sic] hero.
In order
to indicate that the withdrawal took place so instantaneously that no human
eye could follow the retreating form, the poet begins by throwing over
his
hero a cloud; not because bystanders saw the cloud in the place of the
vanished shape, but because to our mind things in a cloud are invisible."
Thus, the cloud has a double meaning: it makes the invisible (hyper-velocity)
visible and makes the visible (normal vision) invisible. The practice
of hiding the object with a cloud shows the attempt of the poet to understand
and to display human optical power, motion, and speed and time.
But if invisibility can be used by an author as a purely metaphorical concept, the literal invisibility of myth or science fiction can still be subsequently allegorized by readers precisely as some sort of social or psychological or philosophical condition. This allegorization of invisibility emerges in Wells’ science-fiction novel The Invisible Man itself. While Griffin is virtually invisible, he surely becomes socially invisible. As Bernard Bergonzi says, “…Griffin.…is all too immediate an image for a very common kind of invisibility in modern urban society, the invisibility of alienation and anomie and the total isolation of men from one another.” Wells is certainly aware of this, as evident from his narrative quarantine of Griffin: “...for while we are privileged to see Kemp, Marvel, and even minor characters in moments of reflection or private action....Griffin, the central and crucial character of the tale, appears only in his effect upon others, only in those moments when he chooses to violate his invisibility in one way or another.” While Griffin is certainly both socially invisible and literally invisible, we must focus more on his literal invisibility.
My own motivation to study the treatment of scientific themes in literature and popular culture—in this case optometrical, since I am a student of optometry and optical medicine—leads me to concentrate on artificial and literal invisibility that concerns the following analytical categories: bodily-internal-biological vs. sartorial-external-techno-mechanical invisibility. I therefore need to put aside discussion of allegorical or metaphorical invisibility, as well as the invisibility of fantasized spiritual existence, and focus on the heritage of artificially produced invisibility.
Temporary literal invisibility, often artificially-produced in modern literature, is most often depicted as talismanic or sartorial. In the 13th-century Old High German epic poem Niebelungenleid, Siegfried wins from Alberich the tarnkappe, or a cloak of invisibility. In his seventh adventure, Siegfried accompanies Gunther on his quest to win Brunhild’s hand. Only the man who can throw a spear and stone farther than Brunhild can marry her. Siegfried conceals himself in his Tarnkappe and makes it appear that Gunther has thrown the spear an astounding distance. Perseus’ famed killing of Medusa is likewise achieved with the help of a pair of winged sandals, a magic wallet, and a dark helmet of invisibility which once belonged to Hades.
The classical standard model of the sort of talismanic power of invisibility seen in Siegfried’s tarnkappe or Perseus’ sandals is Plato’s account in Book II of The Republic. The tale of the ring of Gyges is in fact the fountainhead of such talismanic invisibility. Gyges, the king of Lydia (what is now Turkey), ruled from about 680 to 652 B.C. He founded the Mermnad dynasty and his kingdom became a military power. Gyges’ method of coming to power was, according to all ancient sources, to slay King Candaules and marry his queen. But accounts of the actual event vary greatly. Plato’s Glaucon retells the story of the ring of Gyges in order to debate whether or not justice is really a matter of convenience. In the tale, Gyges is a shepherd who finds a ring which makes him invisible if he turns the ring one way, and visible if he turns it the other way. With his new-found power, Gyges kills the king, seduces the queen, and seizes the throne of Lydia. In telling this story, Plato is able to ask why any man should do right if he can do wrong (with the aid of invisibility) without any consequences. Gyges’ invisibility is both figural and literal in that his ability to be invisible is actual though temporary, but it is a true invisibility in the sense that Gyges is not merely “cloaked” with invisibility--i.e., Siegfried’s cloak “wraps” him up from surrounding light and the view of human eyes. Gyges’ ring transforms the Lydian king. Gyges’ ring has been a major source for novels such as the trilogy The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and Wells’ The Invisible Man. Tolkien’s trilogy treats the most famous version of Gyges’ ring. In Tolkien’s story, the Great Ring is the greatest of several magical rings which are originally fashioned for the evil Sauron, Tolkien’s literary proxy for Satan. A slimy creature named Gollum comes to own the ring, (which he calls “Precious”) and it is stolen by Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming Hobbit. The ring, which can take hold of its invisible wearer’s mind, must be destroyed before Sauron retrieves it. Tolkien clearly borrows several elements of this fantasy from the Edda and especially the Niebelungunleid tarnkappe. The negative implications of having such a power is evident in the trilogy, just as Wells’ Griffin finally sees that invisibility is not as wonderful as it seems at first.
The ethical questions evoked by Tolkien and Plato assume along with ancient myths and folklore that invisibility is of a magical and/or divine nature. Consequently, this ethical paradigm dominated, and there had been a lack of writing on the connection between science and invisibility until 1897. Wells, in The Invisible Man, takes the intriguing notion of invisibility and attaches a scientific explanation and practical consequence to an otherwise supernatural effect. His contemporaries, such as Guy de Maupassant and Ambrose Bierce treated too the invisibility topos, but they wrote more often of invisible monsters and demons resembling more the beings of supernatural fantasy and science fiction. C. Howard Hinton’s 1895 novel Stella focuses on invisibility as well, but only as something magically given to a poor henpecked husband who wishes to disappear at times. Some practical consequences of his literal invisibility are offered as comedy, such as the sight of empty pants walking around the house.
If most examples of a talismanic, literal invisibility in fantasy literature and in folklore or myth involve the magical masking of a whole body—a macroscopic living form—then Wells gives us the transformation at the microscopic level, at what one might imagine is the cellular level, of the living and constitutive tissues or substances of that body. He draws from his knowledge of optics and chemistry to invent a pill for invisibility, a far cry from a divinely-sent convenient cloud. His interest lies not in Platonic ethics, but in the practical problems of invisibility. Thus, according to Philip Holt, Wells “took the premise of invisibility from Plato and developed it in his own way, along the lines characteristic of Wellsian fantasy.”
Wells transforms the myth of the ring of Gyges into
a “ring” in the form of a pill. Griffin discovers the formula for
a pill to make his body invisible from the inside out, from the cellular
and microscopic level up through the systemic and bodily levels.
With The Invisible Man, Wells ventures into the world of internal
invisibility.
The virtual invisibility of the human body, whether scientific or magical,
is representative of an internal transformation. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr.Jekyll
and Mr.Hyde likewise was a prime contemporaneous example of a character
transforming from the inside out, from the cellular level through systemic
levels.
Conversely, external invisibility is not on the cellular level. Instead, external invisibility involves a cloaking or surrounding of the body from an external source. Siegfried’s tarnkappe in the Niebelungenleid only offers invisibility when it is worn by the bearer. Homer’s clouds and mists as well as Virgil’s storms, when used to hide characters, are also examples of the external blocking of vision’s light--since vision, as Aristotle and the ancients believed, was due to the intersection of a light ray sent from an inspecting eye to the object it perceived. Yet within our last century, technoscientific research in optical physics has included external cloaking devices for military units such as planes or submarines. The Philadelphia Experiment of 1943 involves a modern legend about external invisibility turned to internal invisibility. In this legend, the U.S. Navy allegedly worked towards making a warship, the USS Eldridge, invisible to the enemy using Einstein’s Unified Field Theory to figure out how to build machines that would bend light and radio waves around massive magnetic fields. The Navy’s electronic camouflage research supposedly made a ship and its crew both invisible to radar and to the naked eye as well. Legends like the Philadelphia Experiment are examples of the new technoscientific fantasy of invisibility that in turn gave rise to the advances in stealth and detection technology. Invisibility has been propelled, as a scientifictional theme, not by advances in biological science but in the culturally deified domain of twentieth-century technology—electronics and the physics of electromagnetism.
It is evident that interest in external invisibility, whether in Siegfried’s tarnkappe or the USS Eldridge’s electromagnetic field, is still strong in the popular imagination. The techno-gadget in the film Predator uses active camouflage, which bends light around a hostile alien and whatever he carries as he hunts humans in a central American jungle. Television shows such as The X-Files present episodes reminiscent of the Philadelphia Experiment to attract viewers interested in the paranormal or technoscientific oddities, such as invisibility. The 1984 British serial “The Invisible Man” was a prime example of the stream of films and television shows which catered to the public’s appetite for the paranormality of the invisible. In this show, a scientist named Westin discovers the secret to invisibility and uses his unique power to solve crimes. Another popular medium for invisibility is the role-playing game. “Dungeons and Dragons” and the role-playing Magic cards offer players the power of invisibility as a potential tool to win. It is games such as these that show the descent of ludic invisibility from mythological tales like Plato’s Ring of Gyges and the Niebelungenleid. So at the height of the scientific age, the magical or fantasy element is still very much present along side the interest in the science of invisibility.
Among all the stories of invisibility, whether fantasy
or scientifically-based, Wells’ novel still stands out. His novel is the
most important text to present the theme. To repeat, Wells provides
scientific explanations for achieving invisibility coupled with the recognition
of practical consequences of this power. In doing so, he opens
the door for other science fiction writers to speculate on possible scientific
and biological explanations for other yet unexplored formerly supernatural
powers. We will now focus on his novel since it draws on the main
structural categories previously delineated--literal/figural, scientific/magical--while
subordinating each to the scientific.
--A.R. May 1999