Many people are drawn to creepy things. I don’t mean the horrific, not bugs and brains and guts. I mean a gentle unease, an anxious anticipation, a sense that things are not quite right. I mean clowns, and graveyards, and long hallways with flickering lights and no people. There is an art to creating creepy things, and much art is creepy.

Take the song “A-ha!” by Imogen Heap. It is a son that seems designed to impart a creepy sensation. On its YouTube video, one user comments:

Some are more brash:

We can give it a listen to find out for ourselves[i].

So, what makes this song creepy? What makes any song creepy? At first listen, it may seem like a product of the music (what could be called the instrumental aspect of the song). The fast-paced tempo and the disjointed melodies seem intended to create a sense of creepiness. But this may not be the only thing at play; it may be that this cannot be the only thing at play. Colin Radford states that “a piece of music is simply a (usually rhythmic) sequence of sounds, selected and organized by the composer…. that is all.” (Radford 71) He argues “that listening to sad (or angry, or creepy) music makes you sad simply in the way in which a change in one’s hormonal levels can make one agitated or sad.”, and that “the hormonal change is not itself sad” as to be sad, you must “find something to be sad about, an “object.”” (70). Radford argues that music cannot create emotion on its own, for music is purely abstract. Emotion must be connected to the world, and for that an object is necessary.

The lyrics of “A-ha” may prove to be this object. That is, they may allow us to connect the abstract feelings of creepiness to the world such that it can become true emotion. While they may sound like nonsense at first, the lyrics may be key to understanding how the song can create the creepiness feeling. Yet to answer the question about how the lyrics of “A-ha!” make the song creepy, it is necessary to understand creepiness in the first place.

The working psychological hypothesis entails that being “creeped out” is “an evolved adaptive emotional response to ambiguity about the presence of threat that enables us to maintain vigilance during times of uncertainty” (Mcandrew & Koehnke, 2016). The two key phrases here are that for a situation to be creepy, there needs to be both “uncertainty” and an ambiguous “presence of threat”. To create a sense of creepiness, the lyrics of “A-ha!” must do both these things, open a sense of uncertainty, and induce anxiety about an ambiguous threat into it.

Let’s start at the beginning: “Eat, sleep, and breathe that you’re full of the stuff”. Notice that eating, sleeping, and breathing are necessities for life. “The stuff” in this lyric then could easily be life itself. But it also could not be. The lyrics do not say “Eat, sleep, and breathe that you’re full of life”. They purposely introduce ambiguity and uncertainty. “Stuff” could be almost anything. The language is trying to avoid referring to anything, so it uses the word “stuff”. It is reasonable to assume that this language introduces uncertainty by what it tries to avoid stating directly, when it denies its ability to refer.

By denying this drive towards reference, we see the language in “A-ha!” drawing attention to itself. We see this in the next phrase “Wheat-meat-dairy-free, tee total, So happy clappy”. The most distinctive parts of this sentence are not what the words mean, but the rhymes and alliteration. “Free, tee total” and “happy clappy” are arguably the two most distinctive segments of this phrase if we view it from this standpoint. It is important to note that we still can, and perhaps instinctively do, try to gain meaning from the sentence. Yet the meaning is almost certainly less apparent than the language itself. We see the attempted denial of reference, the subsequent introduction of uncertainty, and the focus on language itself throughout the song “A-ha!”.

We can now draw our attention to the lyric “Busy bee wave, wave ‘save the planet’ flag. But sneaky in suburbia”. A curious word here is “but” which indicates that the two clauses are related to each other. The second phrase should contradict or provide a counterpoint to the second. At the very least, one should refer to the other. Yet finding a connection proves difficult. If you look hard enough, you could propose that “Busy bee wave, wave ‘save the planet’ flag” is an incrimination of movements to protect the environment, on the grounds that they intrude upon leisure and life (hence the “busy bee wave”). The second clause could be an escape in the form of being “sneaky in suburbia”, with suburbia in this case as the opposing term to “save the planet”. But this seems like a reach. It perhaps more tenable to consider that the phrases are not related to each other, or that they are only related in an incidental way. The “but” has the same purpose as “stuff” from earlier. It attempts to disrupt the language’s ability to refer, and introduces uncertainty in the process.

Finally, we can note a phrase towards the end of the song. Here we see: “And put the deepest Swiss bank trust in you” instead of the seemingly more obvious “And put the deepest trust in you”.  Here the two words “swiss bank” perform an important function, calling to mind different ideas of what “trust” means. It is now ambiguous as to whether “trust” refers to personal confidence in somebody, or a bundle of money held by a bank. “Swiss Bank” interrupts the phrase’s reference chain, again creating a sense of ambiguity.

Yet this cannot be the whole picture. If all the lyrics of “A-ha!” do is deny their ability to refer, the song would have a lot of uncertainty, but not a lot of anxiety. There would be ambiguity, but no threat. “A-Ha!” probably wouldn’t be all that creepy. Yet it is important to note that language can’t just deny its ability to refer. All words carry a basket of connotations. All words mean something. All language must refer. The language of “A-ha!” may purposely impede its ability to refer, but it still refers nonetheless.

It becomes apparent that “A-ha!” cannot mean nothing, even if it tries to. So, what does “A-ha!” mean? What are the references that it draws? We have already shown that the lyrics of the song create a sense of uncertainty. Perhaps by dumping a basket of connotations upon the listener, many of which create a sense of anxiety, “A-ha!” can project a sense of creepiness into the uncertainty it has created.

Consider the phrase “Golden boy boots”. The reader in this case reads “golden boy”, We think of young male entrepreneurs and politicians, your Zuckerbergs, Obamas, and Rubios. We are distilled with ideas of success and accomplishment. Then we hear “boots”, which is a bit of an odd word to hear after golden boy. It introduces the idea of necessity; the golden boy needs boots. There is a level of utilitarian necessity in the word “boots”, work boots come to mind.  Additionally, the word “boots” has connotations relating to fashion, that of style boots and uggs. It could be that the “boots” destabilizes the implied self-sufficiency and masculinity of the “golden boy”. We see more indication of this attempt at a building with a subsequent destabilization in the following phrase, “pocket pedestal”. A pedestal raises something or someone up, bringing it into a position of respect and attention. But a “pocket pedestal” implies a smallness and a ubiquity. Not only that, but a pocket pedestal destabilizes the idea of a pedestal in the first place. Not everything can be admired and respected. In respect to the individual, it may not be too much of a stretch to say that the idea of a pocket pedestal undermines the often-repeated platitude “believe in yourself”. So, the overall picture is one of undermined assurance, introducing anxiety in the place of confidence.

We see another instance of references that seem designed to produce feelings of anxiety in the lyric “You should try it, you should know. Go on while no one’s looking.” Here Heap is speaking directly to the listener. The message is coercive. “You should try it” creates a pressure to do something, something which is probably “bad” or not allowed, for it is important to “go on while no one’s looking”. “You should know” conveys the idea that the listener is missing out.

Now we can turn our attention to the titular lines, which perhaps do the most to create a sense of anxiety in “A-ha!”. “A-ha! Caught you now! Caught you red handed in the biscuit tin! Cost you to keep me quiet” and “A-ha! Candid camera! Hook, line and sinker.” These lines can be read as a kind of spotlight on the unsuspecting listener, the A-ha! of being found doing something slightly naughty—of being “caught red handed in the biscuit tin”— and of being watched—hence the “Candid Camera.” There is even the idea of blackmail (which I would think is fairly anxiety inducing) with the “Cost you to keep me quiet.”

To create creepiness, it is not enough for “A-ha!” to just deny its ability to refer to the world. But interestingly, it is not enough for “A-ha!” to just refer either. The lyrics must perform two functions. They must inhibit their own ability to refer, yet refer nonetheless. And these references must be directed, such that they produce connotations relevant to the emotion of creepiness. Taken together, these allow “A-ha!” to introduce an anxious ambiguity about the presence of a threat. They create creepiness.

[i] Full lyric transcript: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/imogenheap/aha.html

Works Cited:

Mcandrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016, March 16). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10-15. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.03.003

Radford, C. (1989). Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47(1), 69. doi:10.2307/431994

To the modern reader, it might be hard to shake the feeling that Milton is just another stuffy old writer. It’s easy to write him off as just another one of those old Brits that your English teacher made you read – important and foundational and all, but dull, a bit tedious. His most famous association, after all, is that he wrote a really long poem about the Bible. He might seem merely as pious and devout as they come, offering little more than an affirmation of old-school Christianity. But what, then, are we to make of the fact the Milton was a vocal proponent of the English Revolution, that he was one of? How is the modern reader supposed to reconcile Milton’s reversion to the Bible with his desire for political liberation? And is it possible that someone who seemed to be writing about the Bible may have been talking about politics all along? It might turn out that Milton might be m0re radical than his poetry, at least on the surface, seems to appear.

The question before us, then, is the extent to which Milton’s religious poetry can be read as a poetics of political revolution. But that will be only the first task at hand; we’ll also want to figure out how this changes the way we read Milton, how we see him as a literary figure. Milton’s Nativity Ode offers a place to start. Written around Christmastime of 1629, though not published until 1645, the poem is a description of the nativity story in the style of a hymn. The poem might seem, at first glance, a relatively simple accomplishment, being neither the grandest of Milton’s works nor the most dramatic. But the poem’s structure and language, upon closer reading, present a number of interpretive challenges and surprising insights into Milton’s literary world.

The place to start, of course, is the beginning, which establishes the setting of the nativity.

This is the Month, and this the happy morn

Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,

Our great redemption from above did bring;

For so the holy sages once did sing,

That he our deadly forfeit should release,

And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

The first thing to note is that in establishing the nativity setting, the poem sets out to tell the story of the nativity story from the Old Testament, in which the prophets spoke of a “Son of God” descending “from above” to live among men. The poem continues in this vain, later stating “it was the winter wilde, while the head’n-born child, all meanly wrapt in rude manger lies.” Much like Paradise Lost, which is a retelling of the Genesis story, this poem is, at its core, a retelling of the Nativity. This forces us to stop and ask an imperative question: why does Milton think we need a re-telling of the nativity story? The simple fact that Milton is repeating a story already told places the poem in competition with the Old Testament. After all, if all Milton wanted people to do was read the Nativity story, pay attention to the prophets of the Old Testament, and praise the birth of Christ, he could have just told us to read the Bible. In retelling a biblical story, then, this poem at once aligns itself and is in competition with the Bible itself.

But beyond its relationship with the Bible, the poem is, curiously, also in linked to early Latin poetry. As many scholars have noted, the so-called “prophetic strain” of this poem is strikingly similar to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, “The Golden Age.” The most important thing to note about Virgil is that the Fourth Eclogue is generally seen as the great classical descriptions of the regeneration of the world. In this sense, the comparisons between these poems are clear: both depict the transformation of the world by a divine baby and the arrival on Earth of a virgin goddess;  “he shall receive the life of gods, and himself be seen of them, and with his father’s worth reign o’er a world at peace,” writes Virgil. Curiously, however, Milton’s poem makes a point of rejecting the figures of the pagan tradition; “The Oracles are dumm,” he writes, adding that “Apollo from his shrine can no more divine, with hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.” The denunciation of the pagan world leads to the central conflict in the comparison of Milton and Virgil: Milton does not just adapt the form of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, but the act of adaptation actually functions as a corrective process. The pagan prophecy is converted into an affirmation of Christianity that manages to denounce Virgil in the process; as J. Martin Evans writes, Virgil’s classical framework is “adjusted and modified to meet the demands of a new ideology.” The comparison of the Nativity Ode with its predecessors, both Virgil and the Old Testament, places Milton is a sort of biblical-pagan matrix. The poem is at once aligned with the works of old while standing in competition with them, offering a curious retelling of the Bible and a Christian replacement of Virgil.

It is becoming clear, then, that the Nativity Ode in interested in more than just ordinary praise of the baby Jesus; the poem imagines nothing less than the total transformation of the world. As already mentioned, the poem does away with the authority of the Pagan gods, banishing the “brutish gods of Nile” and stating “Nor is Osiris seen in Memphian Grove;” as Milton writes, “each particular power forgoes his wonted seat.” But then the poem goes even further than more than the removal from power of these pagan figures; it imagines a cosmic transformation of nature upon the birth of the baby. Consider the following passage:

It was the Winter wilde,

While the Heav’n-born-childe,

All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;

Nature in aw to him

Had doff’t her gawdy trim,

With her great Master so to sympathize

As we can already see, Milton imagines nature as secondary to the newborn baby. Nature is “in aw” to him; he is its “Master.” But Milton goes even further later on, imagining nature cowering in the presence of the baby:

And through the shady gloom

Had given day her room,

The Sun himself with-held his wonted speed,

And hid his head for shame,

And his inferiour flame,

The new-enlightn’d world no more should need;

He saw a greater Sun appear

Then his bright Throne, or burning Axletree could bear.

We see here that the Sun becomes weakened with the birth of the baby; the sun “hid his head for shame,” and the world no longer needs his “inferior flame” now that a “greater Sun” has appeared. The poem replaces the sun with the baby, the “Prince of light,” whose “raign of peace upon the earth began.” In this way, the poem imagines the birth of Christ as the beginning of a revolution, a supernatural reordering of the natural world.

But then the important thing to note is that the poem imagines this revolution in an apocalyptic fashion; it portrays this new world order as the result of the Earth’s progression towards its limit, when “truth and justice with return down to men” and heaven “will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.” Indeed, the entire poem marches steadily towards the world’s final destination, towards the cataclysmic moment when:

With such a horrid clang

As on mount Sinai rang

While the red fire, and smouldring clouds out brake:

The aged Earth aghast

With terror of that blast

Shall from the surface to the center shake

When at the world’s last session

The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne.

This is, as the poem says, “the world’s last session.” And in the poem, this transformation gives way to the creation of a heaven on Earth – a world in which “at last our bliss full and perfect is.” This is the world that Milton described earlier – the world of the banished pagan gods and the abolition of Hell. It should be noted, then, that the apocalypse is the end of the world as we know it, but not the end of the world itself. This is the apocalypse, rather, of the radical millenarians, wherein the end of the world gives way to the reign of saints on Earth and God comes down to live among men – this is, to the radical millenarians the second coming of Jesus Christ.

We can see, then, that the poem is interested in the rejection of the past by way of a Puritan vision of the apocalyptic second coming of Jesus Christ. But then it’s even more than that – in describing the transformation of the world as the result of the second coming, Milton actually turns the reader into the poem’s subjects of conversion. For one thing, we have to note that the poem never refers directly to the author alone. As J. Martin Evans has explains, this distinguishes the poem from the work of Milton’s contemporaries, for often wrote of personal transformations of both the author and the subjects within their poem. Milton’s poem, on the other hand, is entirely anonymous, never once acknowledging any personal transformation on the part of the author; the poem does  not even contain a single “I” or “me.” Nor is does the poem demonstrate the personal transformations of any of its characters – even the Shepherds are unmoved, merely “simply chatting in a rustick row” and keeping themselves busy with their “silly thoughts.” Indeed, there is no subjective presence in Milton’s poem that actually undergoes any spiritual transformation. Rather, it allows the reader to bear witness to the transformation of the world before subtly inviting the reader to take part in the poem’s vision of the new society. After all, the poem claims that the newborn babe will “redeem our loss so both himself and us to glorify” and will usher in an era of “our bliss;” By the use of the word “our,” the poem invites the reader into its temporal world such that it turns the reader into its subject of conversion; it invites the reader to become aware of the consequences of the new birth and take part in the poem’s post-apocalyptic vision. Indeed, the poem takes on a clear agenda: the conversion of its reader-subjects to its distinctive religious ideology through its imagined transformation of civilization.

We’ve figured out, then, that the poem has a distinctive goal: it aims to recruit its readers to its cause of creating a new world order in line with the thinking of radical millenarians. Unmistakably, this is directly related to the politics of revolutionary England in the seventeenth century – and, as we said earlier,  Milton was one of its most vocal proponents. In his 1641 pamphlet Of Reformation, Milton stated his belief that the second coming was imminent, that Christ would “judge the several kingdoms of the world” and “put an end to all earthly tyrannies.” Furthermore, in The Reason of Church Government, Milton advocates the creation of a church-governed state; “since Church-government is so strictly commanded in Gods Word,” he writes, “the first and greatest reason why we should submit thereto, is because God hath so commanded.” Indeed, Milton’s stance was that the reign of the King is a threat to the rule of God on Earth, a conviction which comes to light most prominently in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in which Milton identifies King Charles I as the Antichrist, defends the right of the people to revolt against the tyranny of their monarchs, and openly advocates the execution of the King.

It would seem, then, that to Milton, religion and politics are inextricably linked. But the question before us is whether Milton’s political beliefs are manifest in the Nativity Ode, which, at least on the surface, is fairly devoid of political language. All we need to do, however, is draw parallels between Milton’s political writings and the language of the poem to see that the poem has a distinctive political ideology. At the very beginning, for example, Milton refers to the baby as the “Son of Heavn’s eternal King” – and if the baby is Jesus, then the King of Heaven must be God, his father. Of course, this places God in competition with the monarchs. Milton makes this much clear later on when he writes that “The Trumpet spake not to the armed throng, and Kings sate still with awfull eye” upon the arrival of the baby; the kings are paralyzed in his presence. This correlates to the earlier analogy of the replacement of the Sun and the reordering of the Earth. As we already determined, the birth of the baby weakens the power of the Sun; it “hid his head in shame, as his inferiour flame the new-englightn’d world no more should need,” the poem reads. It turns out, however, that this image of the replacement of the Sun actually uses political language. Milton states, after all, that with the birth of the baby, the Sun witnesses the appearance of “a greater Sun” than “his bright Throne” could bear. We cannot miss, here, that Milton’s Sun sits like a King upon its throne, only to be deposed with the birth of the baby. It would seem, then, that the cosmic restructuring that the poem imagines – the rejection of the Gods of the pagan past, the apocalyptic second coming of Christ, the deposition of the Sun – directly correlates to Milton’s advocacy of the political overhaul of the English Revolution. If this is the case, then the whole poem can be read not just as a religious piece, but as a vehicle for Milton’s political ideology.

This brings us to a central interpretive question: did Milton intend for this poem to be political? The simple answer is that we can’t really know. After all, the poem is not strictly about politics, even if it uses something of political language. Falling short of a statement of intention from Milton himself, we really have no way of knowing what exactly his intentions were – we cannot, even through his works, concretely step inside his mind. The more nuanced point, however, is that we really needn’t care. To the seventeenth-century English reader, after all, Milton would have been associated with the political ideas he advocated in his pamphlets. In this sense, Milton, through all of his writing, would have cultivated a reputation as a revolutionary and an image as a radical political mind. In line with the thinking of Foucault, then, we can say that Milton existed through his writing not merely as an author, but as an author-image with a distinctive ideology. As Foucault argues, the image of an author transcends the author themselves, such that “the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society.” Milton, then, offers an ideal example of Foucault’s argument, as the consideration of Milton as an author-image allows us to uncover the political ideologies of even his religious writings.

But then there is one last step to figuring out what the poem is really after. As we can already see, the poem’s focus on radical millenarianism correlates to Milton’s advocacy of the English Revolution in that both concepts are interested in the creation of a heavenly state. Through this line of thinking, however, we can specify that the removal of the Sun from its “throne,” a part of the poem’s cosmic restructuring of the world, seems to be an allegory for the deposition of the King. The cause of this regicide is, in the poem’s terms, the birth of the baby, which is the source of the apocalypse and the revolution that follows. Now is the time to note, however, the central curiosity of the entire poem: it never actually names the baby as Jesus. Throughout the poem, baby is referred to only in the third person – he is referred to only as the “son of heavn’s eternal king,” the “prince of light,” the “babe.” Indeed, the poem never actually addresses Jesus himself. To imply that the poem would not be read as a reference to Jesus, of course, would be off the mark; after all, it references the nativity in its title. However, if we strictly consider the language of the poem in isolation, this observation does leave the identity of the source of the revolution unresolved and ambiguous.

Indeed, the babe the poem is celebrating is an unnamed source of revolution. But then we must remember that this poem is not really about the nativity; when we consider its radical millenarian position, we see that fashions its telling of the nativity story as a prophecy of the second coming. And in proceeding to invite the reader into its post-apocalyptic world, the poem is really inviting the reader to join the revolutionary cause that this newborn babe ignites. If the babe in the poem is the instigator of the revolution, then when the poem is taken as an allegory for seventeenth-century England, the babe must be the leading crusader of the revolutionary cause, the one who leads the charge for the beheading of the King. And as we already saw, to the seventeenth-century English reader, Milton had cultivated an author-image as the main advocate of the Revolution, a position that would be only further cemented by Paradise Lost, which would affirm his stalwart defense of the revolutionary cause even in the years after the Glorious Restoration. It might just be possible, then, that the poem does more than just issue of prophecy of the second coming. Rather, it might just be that when we consider the poem in terms of Milton’s representative author-image, the poem fashions Milton himself as the embodiment of the second coming, he who ignites the flames of revolution.

Works Cited:

J. Martin Evans, “The Poetry of Absence.” In The Miltonic Moment, 11-38. (University Press of Kentucky, 1998) 21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130hxgd.6.

Christopher Hill, “The Millennium and the Chosen Nation” in Milton and the English Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1978) 279.

Donald Swanson and John Mulryan. “Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: The Virgilian and Biblical Matrices.” Milton Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1989): 59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24464703.

Gordon Teskey, “Milton’s Early English Poems: The Nativity Ode, ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il Penseroso’” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

I think we tend to engage in a bit of managerial task delegation when it comes to the great works of humankind, or at least, in the ways that we label them. We draw neat lines in the sand and send Newton and Wordsworth to their own respective corners; we funnel skills sets into plainly marked professions and are content to never let them touch. We ask the poets to dream, entreat the writers to imagine, beg the artists to create. And we know they will, because that is what they do, and it is in the same vein of knowing that we leave the measuring, the discovering, the facts of the world to the mathematicians and the scientists. And in doing so, we perform the greatest slight of hand known to every magician to ever walk the stage: we split a human being apart.

That is to say, we forget the intrinsic overlap between the one who paints the world and the one who examines it. A scientist does not merely observe, he imagines. And, crucially, he creates, because what the scientist and the artist and the mathematician have in common is that they must find ways to communicate their bits of knowledge and truth with the rest of the world, and the way is almost always language. And while this is not inherently harmful, the language used by a wide majority of the scientific community is indeed overwhelmingly detrimental to minority groups, due largely to the fact that the rhetoric of this field was coined by the white male elites who had near exclusive control of it for most of its lifetime.

Hunting down said language (and said white male elites) doesn’t require too much work. After all, white men have consistently remained in a seat of power in this field since its birth: scientific racism actually calls upon physical bodily measurements to determine intelligence and competence. It is unsurprising that the men who possessed the power to write and therefore create the world did so with their own image in mind, to grant as much favor upon themselves as possible. Indeed, looking back to the classical thinkers gives us an idea of the long-standing nature of these concepts: Roman writer, architect, and engineer Vitruvius (70–25 BC), writes candidly that

“… those races nearest to the southern half of the axis are of lower stature, with swarthy complexions, curly hair, black eyes, and little blood, on account of the sun. This poverty of blood makes them over-timid to stand up against the sword … On the other hand, men born in cold countries are, indeed, ready to meet the shock of arms with great courage and without timidity.”

This sheds some light on exactly how pervasive these physically dependent ideologies are in the scientific world, and how long they have been working against the efforts of minorities to stand on equal footing. To get a more modern look at this phenomenon, Donald McNeil Jr.’s Zika: The Emerging Epidemic makes for a relatively quick and interesting read, covering the events of the Zika outbreak up until the book’s publication last June. Here’s the gist of it: the Zika virus was discovered in a monkey in Uganda in 1947. No one really bothered with the disease for a long time, even when cases started sweeping across island nations in the Pacific, mostly because it was relatively mild and didn’t seem to have any long term health risks. It wasn’t until August 2015 that doctors in Brazil began noticing high rates of microcephaly in the country’s hospitals, and it wasn’t long after that before the real threat of the disease revealed itself: its ability to cross the placenta and attack unborn fetuses. Since then, a number of precautions have been implemented to try and slow the spread of the disease, but scientists aren’t really sure where it’ll go from here, although this doesn’t stop McNeil from positing his own advice to the concerned readers (mostly, stay inside and stop getting pregnant).

The most immediate manipulation of language in this book feels quite unobtrusive to us until we consider it from a distance: the personification, and indeed, characterization, of the Zika virus. It starts when McNeil moves from “the Zika virus” to simply “Zika,” giving a distant and encompassing noun the feel of a singular proper one. Assessments about the nature of the disease move away from the abstract and towards descriptive quantifications of a single individual, as in the following example: “The more we learn about Zika, the scarier it gets” (18). Which reads more like a line from a novel about a zombie apocalypse than an account of an insentient mass of viruses. McNeil does this consistently in the book, and compounds it by attributing complex emotions and intentions to the virus, as well as a myriad of adverbs that coagulate into a bizarrely strong sense of what can almost be called character development. It doesn’t simply enter the cell; it hijacks, “like commandos invading a town and converting its car factory into a bomb factory,” covered in “sinister” spikes and hunting down new victims (23). And, conversely, that’s exactly what McNeil presents the cells to be: victims. They are under attack from the “aggressive spread” (53), the manifestation of helplessness at the hands of the merciless, the powerful, Zika.

In short, McNeil is using subtle word choices to effectively morph the Zika virus into the antagonistic star of a horror story. But this is not unexpected, nor, I would say, avoidable. Scientists must sort through infinite resources when preparing to write on a subject, and in deciding how to convey their selected information, they are invariably creating a narrative. Here we see science not as a pure stream of all that is true in the world, but as a sculpted pond reflecting our own faces back at us. This is the mystery debunked, how one set of data (say, for example, global temperatures over the past 100 years) can be the pinnacle of two very different conclusions (global warming is cyclic versus global warming is catastrophic). This is where the scientist becomes the inventor.

But such inventions are born out of necessity; not only because of the infinite variability of language as a whole, but also because scientific language is charged with the task of turning the physical world, the tangible, into the abstract. J.R. Martin and M.A.K. Halliday present this idea in their book, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power, which examines the relationship between science and linguistics:

“The language of science is, by its nature, a language in which theories are constructed; its special features are exactly those which make theoretical discourse possible. But this clearly means that the language is not passively reflecting some pre-existing conceptual structure, on the contrary, it is actively engaged in bringing such structures into being. They are, in fact, structures of language, as Lemke has expressed it, ‘a scientific theory is a system of related meanings.’ We have to abandon the naïve ‘correspondence’ notion of language, and adopt a more constructivist approach to it.” (Martin, Halliday, 9)

That is to say, the mere fact that there is no one way to interpret or organize the world is indicative of the imprecise nature of scientific language. The scientist can never simply describe the world as it truly exists outside of linguistic interpretation. Instead every account is, at its core, a theoretical construction, which only comes into being by its enunciation. To observe the world is to interpret it. To describe the world is to create it.

It is this ability to mold reality that gives scientific language such weight, and why we must continually examine our use of such language. In that spirit, let us return again to the language of McNeil’s Zika. Although we have already established the inevitability of the creation of a narrative structure, we have not yet looked at how McNeil uses this particular narrative to impart meaning. I think a worthwhile place to start would be in examining the repeated emphasis on the virus’s origins in Africa. Not only is this the metaphorical birth place of the virus, but its childhood home: “It no doubt circulated there for centuries” (32). The problem here lies in the portrayal of the virus as the villain: if we accept this, then we are also accepting an African nationality for said villain.

Following our identification of a villain, we move imperatively to investigate the nature of our victim. McNeil specifies the aggressive and harmful nature of the virus when it moves into what is scientifically categorized as “naïve” territory (28). The word naïve calls forth the image of an innocent, unaware of the dangers of the world; this is the victim, the foil to the virus that actively seeks to cause destruction. On the cellular level, this victim is the host cell’s DNA; on the biological level, it is the unborn fetus; on the conceptual level, it is the American public, for whom McNeil expresses the greatest concern about the “impeding threat” (55).

In further distinguishing the characterization of both the villain and the victim, we can look to the surprisingly consistent rhetoric that McNeil uses to detail the nature of the relationship between the quasi-characters. When speaking of the mosquito known to carry the Zika virus, McNeil repeatedly emphasizes “how hard it was to kill Aedes aegypti because it bred and lived indoors with its victims, as cockroaches do, not off in the swamps, as some other species did” (84). The parallel between the mosquito and the cockroach carries no structural or informational significance, but serves to further encapsulate the villain-virus as something loathsome and repulsive. Mention of the swamps smacks of imperialistic literature caricaturizing African natives wallowing in overgrown wilderness, such as in Heart of Darkness: “Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him.” The victims, in contrast, are intrinsically more civilized by the mere virtue of living indoors. Interestingly enough, McNeil seems to fashion a sort of motif out of the “air-conditioned homes,” referring to them multiple times in the book as the safe space made inaccessible to the villain-virus, which (I’ll just be blunt about it) has developed into the image of a violently aggressive African savage on the hunt for unsuspecting American victims.

And this is where scientific language becomes harmful. McNeil’s narrative makes it easy for white Americans to cast themselves into the roles of the wronged innocents and simultaneously associate the black “others” with stereotypical lines of aggression, fear, and blame. The identification of an out-group, of someone to blame, provides a sense of control over a situation where we find ourselves feeling both frightened and powerless. We don’t have to look farther than the results of the latest election, into the “silent majority” of disgruntled and disenfranchised lower-class white individuals, to know that this is a narrative of deep familiarity. It has been recurrent from the conception of our nation; since then, we have sought to cast it out of the impressionistic and interpretive aspects of our culture, but have made little forward progress in removing its deep roots in scientific language. But we cannot afford to stand in place any longer. For as long as we continue to employ scientific language that stands on the backs of minority groups, we will continue to build a reality that holds true to these narratives. But if we ever hope to reach any semblance of equality, we must push consciously in reverse, making space for the narratives yet unheard. We must allow the powerful language of scientific construction to spill forth from the lips of the oppressed, and thus rebuild the world that we have long accepted. One block – one word – at a time.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover, 1902. Print.

McNeil, Donald. Zika: The Emerging Epidemic. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. 2016. Print.

Martin, J.R., & Halliday, M.A.K. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1993. Print.