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Overview
In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries.
In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are.
“Full of insights drawn from a broad survey of history, literature and philosophy; wherever the invisible is being contemplated, Ball is there to select the juiciest anecdotes . . . [He] is a lucid, witty and highly entertaining guide.” —The Globe and Mail
“A tour-de-force history capped off with an animated discussion of H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226238920 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| Sales rank: | 505,694 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Why We Disappear
It seemed that the ring he had was a magic ring: it made you invisible! He had heard of such things, of course, in old tales; but it was hard to believe that he really had found one, by accident. J. R. R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
In old tales – and usually in our new ones too – no one becomes invisible without a motive. It's the peculiarity of our times that we focus on the means and not the motive. Scientists and technologists today are slowly finding out how to build what they like to call invisibility cloaks and the world watches, for the most part entertained and amazed. But in the old stories, in myths and legends and fairy tales, invisibility was never so laboriously achieved, nor so compromised in the achievement. Making something invisible demanded special knowledge or special favours, but once that ability was secured, the magic simply happened. No one was particularly surprised or impressed by the feat itself; what mattered was not how but why you did it.
What is so easily forgotten when legend and fable are enlisted as a charming bit of scene-setting for announcements of technological advance is that these stories are not engineering challenges set by our ancestors. They might be filled with gods and devils, imps and giants, but they are really about our own world and the things we do to one another. It's in this sense that we have always possessed the secret of invisibility, and have always known where it might lead. We know what powers it conveys, and what dangers.
These are the subjects of my book, and this is why – more than for any banal chronological purposes – it must start at the beginning. For in the history of invisibility, the punchline comes at the outset: it is the earliest manifestations that tell us, in some respects, all we need to know about invisibility. The rest is 'just' the engineering. But it is the engineering – the 'how can we do this' – that discloses most eloquently the complications and repercussions that appear when myth collides with reality. In the gap between what we hoped for and what we got is a glimpse of who we are.
The magic ring
If you could be invisible, what would you do? The chances are that it will have something to do with power, wealth or sex. Perhaps all three, given the opportunity.
If that's so, there is no need to feel guilty. Or rather, it is doubtless good for the soul to experience a little contrition, but your response is not perverse or aberrant. We have it on Plato's authority that this is all perfectly normal. In the Republic he (or rather, his narrator Glaucon) explains that invisibility is not a technical problem but a moral one.
There are several accounts of how Gyges, the ancestor of King Croesus of Lydia, rose from humble origins to found the third dynasty of Lydian kings in the first millennium BC. All of them present him as a usurper and several say he was driven by lust both carnal and political. Gyges, it is generally agreed, stole from Candaules of Lydia both his throne and his wife. According to Herodotus, the old king brought it upon himself by ordering Gyges, who was his bodyguard at the time, to look secretly upon his queen so that he might be compelled to admit her outstanding beauty. Gyges complied unwillingly, but the queen discovered him in his hiding place and, enraged by her husband's shameful behaviour, gave Gyges the option of killing the king or being put to death himself. He could hardly be blamed for the choice he made.
But Plato's account does not offer these extenuating circumstances. His Gyges begins as a shepherd in Candaules' service. While Gyges was tending his flock one day, an earthquake split the ground apart and he descended into the crevice. There he saw a horse made of bronze with doors in its side and, opening them, the dead body of a naked man lying inside, with a gold ring on his finger. Gyges took the ring and put it on.
After returning to the world above, Gyges met with his fellow shepherds, as was their custom, to prepare a monthly report on their flocks for the king. While sitting among his colleagues he happened to turn the ring's collet (the broad flange where a gem may be set) towards his palm, whereupon he vanished from the sight of the company. When he turned the collet outwards, he became visible once again.
That was all it took for Gyges to hatch a bold and mendacious scheme. He contrived to be made one of the messengers who delivered the report to the king, whereupon Plato's version lurches precipitously from bucolic fable to Sophoclean tragedy. As soon as he arrived, Plato writes, Gyges 'committed adultery with the king's wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and took over the kingdom'. These crimes, we are clearly meant to infer, were all done with the aid of Gyges' ring of invisibility.
The moral of the tale, says Glaucon, is that with such a magical charm, no one
would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or bring himself to keep away from other people's property and not touch it, when he could with impunity take whatever he wanted from the market, go into houses and have sexual relations with anyone he wanted, kill anyone, free all those he wished from prison, and do the other things which would make him like a god among men.
Don't imagine that Plato sees this as an unnatural or particularly reprehensible reaction. Glaucon admits that it would be naive to expect anything other than abuse of the privilege of invisibility:
The man who did not wish to do wrong with that opportunity, and did not touch other people's property, would be thought by those who knew it to be very foolish and miserable. They would praise him in public, thus deceiving one another, for fear of being wronged [themselves].
The problems that this poses for the rectitude of state authority – where 'those who practice justice do so against their will because they lack the power to do wrong' – occupy much of the remainder of the Republic.
For Plato, then, invisibility was not a wondrous power but a moral challenge – to which none of us is likely to prove equal. Invisibility corrupts; nothing good could come of it. In particular, invisibility will tempt us towards three things: power, sex and murder. This is the promise that has lured people to seek invisibility throughout time, whether by magical spells or esoteric arts or devices and garments that confer the ability to vanish.
The erotic unseen
Concealment was a useful attribute in the ancient world, where hazards could befall you anywhere. In early Christianity a magical power like invisibility was apt to be denounced as witchcraft – the occasional instances of magic in the Bible are depicted as deceitful trickery. But invisibility was sometimes permitted to saints, who, often originating through a pious retelling of local folklore, enjoyed a latitude not afforded to characters in the Scriptures. The Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century are full of these dubious miracles: a monk, for example, becomes invisible when a group of Franks arrives to plunder his riches. Saint Patrick is said to have eluded the Druidic wizards of Ireland with an invisibility spell.
In mythic and traditional tales, invisibility is almost never a 'power of the body'. It is not that the unseen person knows how to turn him or herself invisible, but rather, this magical advantage is conferred by a talisman of some kind, an object that must be worn. This is more an act of concealment than of vanishing. Very often the talisman is a cap or a cloak – if indeed the two garments sometimes seem almost interchangeable, that is at least partly a linguistic quirk, because in tales of Germanic origin Kap (cape) could easily be conflated with Kappe (cap).
Athena gave Perseus a cap or helmet of invisibility that enabled him to escape from the Gorgons after he had slain their sister Medusa; the goddess wore it herself to fight Ares during the Trojan Wars. The Tarnhelm of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, a magical helmet that enables one to change appearance as well as to become invisible, seems to be the composer's own invention, for there is no such object in the original legend of the Nibelungs. But, being made by the brother of the dwarf smith Alberich, it can claim some mythical precedent in the dwarfish Huliðshjálmr or 'concealing helmet' that features in some Norse tales.
A cloak of invisibility is used by an old soldier to follow the 'twelve dancing princesses' in the Grimms' fairy tale of that name, whereby he discovers the reason why their dancing shoes get worn out during the night: they are secretly going off to dance with twelve dashing princes. For solving this mystery, the soldier is granted the hand in marriage of the eldest daughter and so becomes heir to the throne. That invisibility is here the route to royal power echoes the Gyges story – but one can't fail to notice the recurring element of sexual voyeurism (we can hardly doubt that 'dancing' here is a euphemism), and the gift of invisibility is again freighted with erotic potential.
Invisibility in myth is often tied to sex and seduction. In the Iliad, Zeus cloaks Hera in a 'golden cloud' (unseen often blurs into unseeable) so that they might lie together on top of Mount Ida without the other gods spying on them. A magic ring enables Owain to seduce the Lady of the Fountain in the Welsh Mabinogion. The Egyptian sage Nectanebus used his powers of invisibility to deceive the Macedonian king Philip and his wife Olympias so that he might father Alexander the Great by the queen. According to folklore expert Francisco Vaz da Silva, 'cloaks and rings of invisibility are used mostly to enter an otherworldly realm where the protagonist will either seduce or deliver a princess, or take back his enchanted beloved.'
That's how the eponymous hero uses his invisibility cloak in the Italian fairy tale Lionbruno. The lad is betrothed to the fairy queen Madonna Aquilina after she rescues him from being pledged to the devil by his father's Faustian pact. But his subsequent misdemeanours infuriate Madonna Aquilina, and she banishes him from the fairy kingdom until he has 'worn out seven pairs of iron shoes'. Wandering as a despondent pilgrim, Lionbruno takes a cloak from a band of robbers encountered in a forest (that ubiquitous place of enchantment), tricking them into letting him try it on and so escaping from them. Concealed thus, he is borne by the Sirocco wind back to the fairy realm, where he climbs unseen through the queen's window and hides under her bed. After playing a jest on her by eating her supper (or in the more erotically explicit early versions, by kissing her) while still invisible, he reveals himself and they are reconciled. As one version has it, 'they threw their arms about each other with the truest love, and upon that bed they made their peace.'
Invisibility, then, provides access to liminal places tinged with desire, allure and possibility. Such allegorical content means that magical invisibility in fiction should never function simply as a convenient power that advances the narrative. It should not be bought cheaply, nor used idly. That is why the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings supplies a more satisfying, more mythically valid emblem than the cloaks of invisibility in the Harry Potter series. The latter, made from the hair of a creature from the Far East that can make itself invisible, are trinkets, a piece of incidental, even mundane magic. But magic must not be incidental or mundane, for it pulls on a subtle web of forces and must therefore have consequences. Frodo Baggins' ring will, in the end, steal souls and reduce the bearer to a pitiful, malevolent wraith. This is what invisibility, when depicted in its truthful symbolic guises, does to us: it transforms us and pulls us into another realm. Even if that offers some immediate advantage, we had better not stay this way for too long. Invisibility is a state in which we mustn't linger or be trapped. The 'invisible child' in Tove Jansson's short story of that name in Tales from Moominvalley has faded into her unseen state through neglect and cruelty, and needs to be coaxed back to visibility with love, making this one of the few modern children's stories wise enough to avoid suggesting that this is a 'superpower' it would be fun to possess.
Invisible children
Both the antiquity of speculations about invisibility and its ubiquity as a trope of children's tales should come as no surprise, because a belief in one's ability to become 'unseen' seems to be an innate and normal part of the child's mental landscape. Invisible friends and pets give solace to most children at some point, and children up to about the age of four can disappear at will (so they insist) simply by closing or masking their eyes. As is so often the case with the ways of children, understanding this apparently puerile irrationality seems likely to cast some light on our own cognitive processes. Psychologist James Russell and his coworkers say that children undergo a developmental period 'in which they believe the self is something that must be mutually experienced for it to be perceived'. One might read this as a more general statement about social visibility and its absence.
The child's belief in her own invisibility with closed eyes turns out to be an epistemologically complex statement. The child does not exactly think that her body is hidden from view: whether or not she can be seen is a different matter from whether or not her body is visible. This subtle relationship between body and self becomes clear when Russell and his colleagues tested children aged between two-and-a-half and four by placing masks over the children's eyes and asking 'Can I see you?' In that situation the children would generally say 'no'. But if asked 'Can I see your head?', they would typically reply in the affirmative. They gave the same responses in relation to a third person whose eyes were masked:
'Can I see them?' – 'No'.
'Can I see their head?' – 'Yes'.
Further testing suggested that, for children, the act of seeing a person – which is to say, of knowing about the person's presence – depends on a mutuality of gaze: the child believes that only when an observer locks eyes with her can he register her actuality. To put it another way, for the person to be seen, it is not enough for the body to be visible: seeing is 'eyes meeting'. In this way, a person's visibility becomes, to a child, both a matter of choice and a situation that is socially defined: it requires the consent of both sets of eyes. One wonders what this says about the self-image of visibility of the child who assiduously avoids eye contact, as in some forms of autism.
This is a disconcerting, almost dizzying thought: we're left thinking not how a child can be so foolish as to imagine that they vanish by hiding their eyes, but rather, how extraordinary it is that the self is not located from birth in the physical body – that we have to learn to put it there. Even in maturity we do this only partially and conditionally: there is still a self that we don't wholly equate with the body. 'Do you like it?', I might ask, and you don't think for a moment that I am asking 'Does your body like it?' In this sense the self is always immaterial and unseen; but we learn to accept that it is shackled to visible flesh and blood.
Looked at this way, vanishing in fairy tales – whether to hide, to spy, or to wreak mischief – is not an extraordinary power at all, at least as understood by the youngest children. It is a power that we all have, but that we must relinquish along with infancy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Invisible"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Philip Ball.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
1. Why We Disappear
2. Occult Forces
3. Fear of Obscurity
4. Rays that Bridge Worlds
5. Worlds Without End
6. All in the Mind
7. The People Who Can’t Be Seen
8. Vanishing Point
9. Bedazzled and Confused
10. Unseen at Last?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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