This half term we're going to be turning our attention from poetry to prose (which, you'll recall, means normal writing, whether fiction or non-fiction). Before we sink our teeth into George Orwell's political satire Animal Farm, we're having a little warm-up by looking at Neil Gaiman's short story Babycakes. *
Good work today on identifying some of the layers of meaning packed into this creepy little story! As we discussed, your homework this week, to be handed in on Thursday, is to write a piece of PERSUASIVE WRITING to convince people that they should start using babies to replace all the things that animals were used for, before all the animals suddenly disappeared.
Here's a copy of the story online, in graphic novel format:
http://ljconstantine.com/babycakes/page1.htm
(And you can also listen to the author read it himself on Youtube.)
So, to repeat: YOUR MISSION
The title of your piece of writing (which should be at least one full page long) should be "A Modest Proposal". (Inspired by Jonathan Swift's satirical essay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal )
LO: Use persuasive language successfully.
Structure your argument carefully, expanding on each point in detail
Use appropriate and effective vocabulary.
- Think about who your audience is supposed to be for this. (You're basically playing a role here, and imagining that you're the narrator of the story we read, or somebody like him or her, and that we've lost all the animals, and that people are panicking.)
- Think about what people might say to argue with you, and undermine their points before they can make them, showing how your idea is better than theirs.
- Think about the tone of your writing - you need to be calm, reasonable, and persuasive.
- One of the tricks of rhetoric is to use repetition - some very powerful public speakers do this, subtly borrowing some of the skills used in poetry to make their words sound more authoritative. You might like to try that.
As we said at the start of the year: words are power. Someone who can use language skillfully can convince you that something terrible is actually perfectly reasonable. You see this all around you, in advertising, in politics, in religion. We're going to see a lot of this in 'Animal Farm'.
In Babycakes, the narrator paints a picture of a world in which the lines between 'us' and 'them' have been changed, and people have adjusted their world view so that they no longer think of babies as human, as "us". Although it's a horror story and a parable (rather than something literal and realistic) the frightening truth is that people DO do this all the time. Not usually by considering babies as disposable (although if you put people under enough pressure, that can happen too) but usually by dividing people up by something equally meaningless, like skin colour, or religion, or gender, or nationality, or class. People in the real world DO accept atrocities being performed on other human beings by telling themselves that those other human beings are less human, less worthy - that they're not "us". (It is even more common to accept the suffering of other living beings if it benefits us, although devout Buddhists and Jains, as well as many non-religious vegans, consider this intolerable.)
(*It is perhaps worth mentioning that Neil Gaiman is of Jewish extraction. Thinking about what we discussed regarding the Nazis' treatment of the Jews (and other groups) during World War II, you can probably see why he might be inspired to write a horror story in which babies are recategorised as not human, and are brutally tortured in the name of scientific investigation, and have their body parts used for food or for leather.)
