The Visible Man
Writing about what can’t be seen demands a mastery of description that is not exactly routine. Absent the ability to describe his protagonist through normal mechanics of physical features, Wells stared down the abyss into a very unique problem rarely if ever encountered before: how to convey the impression of a person without being able to use the traditional conventions of physical imagery. Don’t be alarmed; he got around the problem just fine:
“Her visitor...was seated in the armchair…the only light in the room was the red glow from the fire—which lit his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his downcast face in darkness—and the scanty vestiges of the day that came in through the open door. Everything was ruddy, shadowy, and indistinct to her…But for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had…a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was the sensation of a moment: the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it.”
The Marvelous Mr. Marvel
Given the opportunity to engage those traditional conventions of physicality, Wells seems almost ready to pounce. Consider the introduction of Mr. Thomas Marvel who will play a significant role as the narrative plays out. To the point at which he is introduced, he has not even been mentioned by name. The wealthy of imagery that Wells put to the task of describing him—even to the point of directly addressing the reader to almost insist that he pay attention—tells half the story. The other half is that this is the very paragraph of the very first chapter in which Marvel is introduced:
“You must picture Mr. Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination. He wore a furry silk hat, and the frequent substitution of twine and shoe-laces for buttons, apparent at critical points of his costume, marked a man essentially bachelor.”
The Science-y Stuff
Wells is considered a godfather of science fiction, but that doesn’t mean he can be lumped in with the writers of his era who just made things up as they went. Not entirely, anyway. Throughout his science fiction endeavors, Wells usually makes a habit of at least seeming to lend the fiction some scientific credence. In this particular example, for instance, he could very well have simply skipped the entire effort to offer a rational and logical—rational-sound and logical-sounding, at any rate—explanation behind the processes of invisibility. After all, who would question its absence? Instead, he does make quite a convincing effort through the judicious use of scientific imagery accessible to the average reader:
“consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box.”
The Sound of Invisibility
Chapter Eight, “In Transit,” is introduced as being an “exceeding brief” account of an incident in which an amateur naturalist named Gibbons had a quick encounter with the invisible man. The entire chapter is just 158 words long and the bulk of that is another example of how the author exploits aural imagery to describe what cannot be seen as he quickly paints a moment in time which Gibbons—who at this point knows absolutely nothing of the astounding news sweeping the village of the presence of an invisible man:
“heard close to him the sound as of a man coughing, sneezing, and then swearing savagely to himself; and looking, beheld nothing. Yet the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man. It grew to a climax, diminished again, and died away in the distance…It lifted to a spasmodic sneeze and ended. Gibbons had heard nothing of the morning's occurrences, but the phenomenon was so striking and disturbing that his philosophical tranquillity vanished; he got up hastily, and hurried down the steepness of the hill towards the village, as fast as he could go.”
