"Nine Hundred Grandmothers" (1964/1966)
- Jon Nelson
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 minutes ago
"No, no, you are no child of mine"
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God; — Romans 8:16
Originally titled “The Multitudinous Grandmothers,” “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” was a Lafferty favorite, and many of his longtime readers still hold it in especially high regard. Most readers come to it for at least two reasons: its title is unforgettable, and it lends its name to Lafferty’s most successful short-story collection. It might as well be the Jaffa Gate to his canon. Yet, contrarian that I am, I question its reception and am less smitten with it as a masterwork than most Lafferty readers are. That is not to say it is anything less than a great short story. For whatever reason, I have come to associate it with the lazy Lafferty reader. That is not the story’s fault. It is mine. A lot of people have said foolish things about it.
For example, here is the sort of twaddle your typical blogger says about the story (I quote): “Ceran, youthful and desperate for answers, journeys backward in time (metaphorically), waking the sleeping ancestors and asking each the question. But as with Borges and his library, this physical manifestation of eternity and infinity is no more forthcoming or transparent than our own.”
Really? It is as though this were a story by a writer who did not believe Revelation and Mystery are compatible. We all live in a fog about ultimate things, always and forever. That is Lafferty’s point? Yet many people do read it this way, as if it were only about Mystery, and they fail to see how much of the problem is Ceran’s own fault from start to finish. He is a failed person. How odd that so many readers want this to reflection on them (“no more forthcoming or transparent than our own”). They somehow identify with Ceran, and the nine hundred grandmothers laugh at them. Cream is told what he has to do and he does not do it. This is not a Borgesian story. Nor is it a story about epistemically humility. It is about standing outside Revelation as traditio.
Ceran Swicegood is our main character. He is a Special Aspects Man on a human commercial expedition to the asteroid Proavitus. He’s a black sheep amongst the crew. The other men, headed to Proavitus, sport aggressive names and tough-guy personas. That kind of thing helps one exploit worlds. Ceran, though, is different. He keeps his original name and mild demeanor. While the expedition's commander, Manbreaker Crag, wants to wring maximum profit from the alien world—mainly by targeting the biological mechanisms behind the native Proavitoi's apparent immortality—Ceran is obsessed with discovering the origin of life. He is an intellectual. Lafferty shows the contrast between the two sorts, Brahmin intellectual and merchantile capitalist, when Manbreaker confronts him:
"You are Special Aspects Man, Ceran," he said, "and you have been running off after the wrong aspect. [ . . . ] It don't make a damn how it began. What is important is that it may not have to end."
Through conversations with his alien translator, Nokoma, Ceran learns that the Proavitoi do not die; instead, they shrink and sleep as they age. That results in hundreds of generations of living ancestors residing in the basements of their homes.
Now that he has a little information, Ceran infiltrates Nokoma's home while she is away to learn about the ancient beings. He descends a series of underground ramps, moving deeper into the bedrock beneath the house. Along the way, he meets older Proavitoi. He discovers that the crew's rumors of native "living dolls" are literal. The ancestors progressively diminish in size as they age, shrinking from the proportions of small humans down to the size of dolls, then birds, and eventually insects. And the smaller the ancestors become, the sleepier they seem. They speak in older dialects and wake only briefly when disturbed:
They smiled and stretched sleepily, not as humans would, but as very old puppies might. Ceran spoke to them, and they understood each other surprisingly.
At the lowest level, Ceran awakens the bee-sized "ultimate grandmother" of the Proavitoi. He demands to be told about the mysterious origin of Proavitoi. The tiny grandmother explains that their beginning was a highly amusing cosmic joke, but refuses to share it. She says there is a traditional ritual where Ceran must guess the answer over three days. Frustrated, Ceran holds the grandmother between his fingers and bullies her. He says he will crush her, but his inherently gentle nature prevents him from carrying out the threat. Seeing his bluff, the grandmother denies him the secret. The joke might cause a stranger to die of laughter, a risk she playfully refuses to take:
"No, no, you are no child of mine," chortled the ultimate grandmother. "Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?"
And there is laughter, the giggling of a million tiny ancestors, and a laughing and weeping Ceran leaves empty-handed. On his next expedition, he changes his name.
Let’s really strip this one down, as if we were running a chop shop.
First, there is a joke about the sacred mystery of unitive and procreative sex, rendered through Lafferty’s tweaking of the imagery of ancestor worship. The Proavitoi are not ancestor worshippers, but that form of cultus clearly lies in the background of the story. Then there are two lines of epistemic and spiritual failure, each traced through a character. Manbreaker Crag is wrong about the final things. Ceran is, in some ways, worse, because he is not just crassly wrong about fundamental things, but arrogantly and pridefully wrong about them. He may look somewhat sympathetic beside Lafferty’s travestying of the tough-guy spaceman Crag, but Ceran is a great fool and the story’s real monster: a modern researcher who profanes the sacred.
Consider how badly Ceran conducts himself. Offered a catechist in Nokoma, he abandons her. Then he violates Proavitoi culture by sneaking in alone like a grave robber. He is told that the Ritual takes place once a year, is mediated by elders, is prefaced by three days of foolish guessing, and is received through laughter. There is an Easter parallel here, but Ceran insists on having Easter on his own schedule. So he wakes the ancestors out of season, and then he lies to them. He claims that his violation of their cultus is itself a ritual. Asked whether he is one of the grandmother’s children, he lies again. The falsehood is recognized at once, which shows how completely he stands outside their sacred tradition:
"I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother," one said gaily. "All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?" "Of course," said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them.
Then he gets what is coming to him when they laugh at him. How dare he claim the inheritance without having been born into the tradition? And what does he do in response? He issues a threat that amounts to committing sacrilege without even having the conviction to carry it through.
The Proavitoi have a living tradition. Ceran can understand tradition only as data.
Here are two ways of looking at this. The first draws on the distinction between emic and etic understandings of religious culture. One may understand a culture emically, by entering into its local meanings, beliefs, and practices, or etically, by treating it from the outside and comparing it across cultures. One can imagine oneself as Proavitoi. Ceran appears to have approached the Proavitoi in a blunderingly etic fashion.
But that reading does not quite work within the story’s own logic. It uses the inside/outside to draw a secularizing circle around too much. Both the emic and etic stances are within immanent frames. If one were really inside the Provatoi cultus, one would be immortal because the Proavitoi in fact do possess eternal life, and they possess a tradition transmissible only to those who enter the lineage, keep its times, and can laugh at the joke because they are inside it.
Ceran stands outside both the little-t traditions and the big-T Tradition of the Provatoi: outside its ritual expressions, and outside the core transcendental truth those expressions mediate. He violates the first set of traditions by every procedural means available to him, and he stands outside the Tradition itself (he is not one of the "children") because he is hostile to Mystery. He does not accept the possibility of supernatural truth, truth that by its very nature exceeds finite intelligence. So why not cheat one's way through the ritualistic cruft? Ceran is a technocrat, convinced that at the bottom of everything there is data, not persons, so he ends up being smaller than the smallest grandmother.
As for the story’s satirical targets, they are all very near the surface: heroic tedium, extractive commercial civilization, technological-immorality fantasies, modern research’s posture toward traditional knowledge, and Enlightenment epistemology.
I’ll close with something readers seem to overlook: the lines about the odor of sanctity and sadness. Lafferty writes, “They were kind and serene. There was an atmosphere about the scene that barely missed being an odor—not unpleasant, sleepy, reminiscent of something, almost sad.” This sadness is important for understanding the governing image of the laughing grandmothers in “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” because it participates in Chesterton’s image of the laughing Christ, and in the Chesterton-Lafferty theology of sacred laughter, perhaps best expressed in Chesterton’s poem “Secrecy.”
