ABSTRACT
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 joyful acoustic play of words that accompanies narrating scenes of childhood death makes up for the upbeat, albeit disconcerting, philosophical and aesthetic experiences that are radically distinct from the heavily charged ones framed in Kuhn’s study. His sampling seems to encourage conservative and reactive explanations for the literary killings of children, insofar as he links them to the general necessity of eternalizing childhood in the image of the puer aeternus (194), a symbol of the uncorrupted innocent who never grows up to be tainted by sexuality and whose body never deteriorates either morally or physically. Ultimately, the sacrifice of the child aims at the impossible dream of arresting time, by way of saving the child from having to die a second death, as Dylan Thomas’s concluding line to “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” chosen as epigraph to Kuhn’s reflections, so bluntly states: “After the first
death, there is no other” (qtd. in Kuhn 173). In other words, childhood death in literature is perceived as a way of preserving a paradisiacal vision of humankind, prior to its inevitable fall. In contrast, the deaths of children in the seemingly merciless Brazilian folk rhymes discussed in this chapter play a much more subversive and destabilizing role than that of salvaging an idealized existence. What comments about life and death do they make? What images of humankind and childhood do they conjure? What is it about these ancient rhymes that make them an imaginative power still today? Why do children and adults continue to sing and dance to them? And, even more pointedly, what language experience do they encourage us to embrace?
