Chapter 7 - Invisibility’s Arts

Summary

This essay argues that invisibility is a missing keyword and concept in modernist studies. Taking off from the observation that modernism begins and ends with two novels about invisible men, (The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells, 1897; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952), it shows that invisibility offers a new way to think about a swath of key issues. Reading these two texts as bookends to the modernist period opens up not only this singular connection, but a broader web of intertwined forces and topics, and reveals some of the ways that technology, social status, race, science, violence and power were often thought together. Whether as a fantasy or a delusion, a desire or an ironic reality, invisibility mattered to writers in the first half of the century; restoring it to critical view helps to realign and in many cases deepen a range of works and their most pressing preoccupations.