ABSTRACT
Kuhn's overly austere sampling completely disregards a long tradition of nonsense verse that links childhood and death in uniquely challenging ways. On the personal level, the two novels express Rushdie's own social anxieties at moments of production decades apart. On a public level, however, the differing metaphors he employs may be analyzed as barometers of shifting cultural attitudes towards the representation of death within children's literature. In essence, Haroun's quest is to restore 'natural order' between culture and society; thus, only after the citizens of Haroun's hometown rediscover the city's name are they collectively able to recall their past and, in Benjamin's terms, interact to express experience. Yet instead, the Brazilian folk rhymes sing about the resilient condition of childhood in the face of death, even if the child characters are annihilated at the end of every stanza. The experience of consensual death becomes, paradoxically, a testimony to childhood's vital, resilient force that remains unaltered in the presence of destruction.
