Beyond Explanation, and Beyond Inexplicability, in Beyond Silence

Abstract

Beyond Explanation, and Beyond Inexplicability, in Beyond Silence Perry Nodelman (bio) A first reading of Eleanor Cameron's Beyond Silence confused me. The novel somehow both satisfied what Frank Kermode calls "our deep need for intelligible ends"1 and did not satisfy it, so that as I finished the novel, I both felt and did not feel that delight in problems solved and suspense fulfilled that I expect from good stories, and that I had felt at the end of her earlier and deceptively similar novel, The Court of the Stone Children. Of these two feelings, the sense of satisfaction the two novels share is easier to explore. Both The Court of the Stone Children and Beyond Silence begin with a set of three quotations, one about how the past still exists, one about how the future is happening now, and one about the limitations of our conceptions of reality. The idea that the ordinary perception of time's passage ignores a larger reality underlies and gives order to all of Cameron's work. Gil in The Court of the Stone Children says, "All time—past, present, and future—is one Time."2 Dr. Fairlie in Beyond Silence agrees: "It's quite possible that all is coexistent."3 In her discussion of time fantasies in The Green and Burning Tree, Cameron herself says, "Time is not a thread at all, but a globe."4 Furthermore, she praises the English time fantasists for expressing the same idea: "The past and creative magic! Is it the inextricable mingling of these two, the taken for granted presence in their lives of a past thick with myth and legend and fairy tale, that gives the English fantasists, and especially the time fantasists, their depth and their peculiar power of evocation?"5 Both The Court of the Stone Children and Beyond Silence pay homage to that English tradition and its immersion in a living past. But as an American, Cameron cannot take the tradition for granted. In fact, she seems to value it for its distance from contemporary American life, which she finds disorderly and dismisses as incomplete. Of course, life in the past was just as disorderly, just as incomplete; but it was so in a different way, and the difference gives it glamor for [End Page 122] Cameron and for us, a glamor that it did not have for those who were stuck with it. In English fantasies like Boston's Green Knowe series or Uttley's A Traveler in Time, the past comes alive in an old house; in The Court of the Stone Children it comes alive in a museum, a reconstruction in San Francisco of rooms from a European house. "These rooms are from my home in France," says Domi, ". . . But it is not the same . . . ! This is a kind of strange, twisted dream of my home, the same and yet weirdly not the same" (p. 38). The novel is like its setting, the same as the English time fantasies it is modeled on, and yet weirdly not the same. The difference is that movement across time offers children in the English fantasies a satisfying sense of connection with a place where they already live; but Nina finds completeness by moving away from the jarring anarchy of contemporary San Francisco into Domi's alien and satisfyingly orderly rooms. In Beyond Silence the homage to the order of the past and to the English fantasies that evoke it is even more explicit. Like Tolly in The Children of Green Knowe, Andrew hears children of another time sing nursery rhymes. Like Tolly and also like Tom in Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, his contacts with the past significantly involve a tree falling in a storm; and in both Tom's Midnight Garden and Beyond Silence, a woman from the past marries a man named Barty. Above all, Andrew actually leaves California and seems to feel more at home in Scotland; surrounded by relics of the past, he escapes his own confusion by moving across time. In fact, Beyond Silence shares with The Court of the Stone Children and with the English time fantasies a resolution that does literally what all...