The Great Chain of Being

What is it?

The Great Chain of Being is a philosophical concept that has a long history of being rooted in human psyche. Stemming from the Neoplatonic principle of plenitude in the universe, the notion was then elaborated, tweaked, and built upon to suit the philosophical attitudes of Medieval, Early Modern, and 18th century artists, writers and thinkers. This entry focuses on Early Modern, and more specifically Elizabethan, notions of The Great Chain because it is during this era that most proliferated the philosophy in literature and theoretical writings.

The Great Chain  is a mechanism used to codify and order all of creation’s beings, and a “metaphor to express the unimaginable plenitude of God’s creation” the universe’s “unfaltering order, and its ultimate unity” and the chain itself “stretched from the foot of God’s throne to the meanest of inanimate objects” (Tillyard 26).  Visually it is not only a way of viewing all creation as conjoined, but also as hierarchical leading up to the true perfection of God. Objects are “chained together in a hierarchy according to increased physical complexity and mental sophistication” (Blakemore and Jennett). The order goes as follows:

God: existence + life + will + reason + immortality + omniscient, omnipotent

Angels: existence + life + will + reason + immortality

Humanity: existence + life +  will + reason

Animals: existence + life + will

Plants: existence + life

Matter: existence

Nothingness 

Creatures higher on the chain were believed to be closer to God, and thus have authority over lower and lesser beings. Within each section of the chain there are further divisions and hierarchies. For example in the inanimate  Plant and Matter classes “water is nobler than earth, the ruby than the topaz, gold than brass”, for the vegetable class “the oak is nobler than the bramble”, and in the animate Animal and Human classes the lion nobler than the dog and the king nobler than the layman (Tillyard 28). In many cases, The Great Chain of Being was used for validation and explanation for the divine right of kings in the earthly realm, for God placed them in the highest spot on the chain possible for humanity thus situating them directly below spiritual beings.

The Chain for Elizabethans represented the pure order of creation, and highlighted their borderline paranoia for the balance of society and the universe. With The Chain, every being clearly knew their place and understood that it was preordained by a higher power, namely God. A break in the chain, or an attempt from one creature to surpass its position in the chain promised chaos in the cosmic order. Shakespeare morphed The Great Chain into a large number of his plays, and created a literary trope from the philosophy. His plays explored situations where The Great Chain was broken, and showcased the chaos and turmoil that ensues.  Macbeth is a great example of this. When Macbeth kills King Duncan he disrupts The Great Chain. As a thane Macbeth is subservient to  the king. By killing him he is acting out of his allotted place in nature in attempts to surpass is place on The Chain. The next scene in the play is a terrible storm that causes animals to cannibalize one another. The breaking of the chain resulted in unnatural occurrences in the play. A great storm ensues that plunges the scene into darkness, and a sentry reports that the horses in the stables began to cannibalize one another. One man breaking The Chain causes the very elements of nature to revolt.

I chose this example because Gravity’s Rainbow is its modern–or should I say postmodern equivalent. Shakespeare’s Great Chain of Being is deployed in the Imipolex-G narrative thread. The new plastic Jamf helps create is an image representing modern technology and innovation but also serves as imagery for the Great Chain in a Shakespearean sense. The image is a layered one. Jamf’s Imipolex-G chemical construction is a chain, and the invention of the plastic itself represents man’s movement outside of their place in the chain.  Pynchon introduces Imipolex-G as “nothing more –or less– sinister than a new plastic, and aromatic heterocyclic polymer, developed in 1939, years before its time” (252). In context of The Great Chain, the invention of plastic is a sinister act against nature and thus against cosmic balance. The organic materials found in the polymer were bent and manipulated by man in general but more specifically Jamf to form a new substance. Because it is a synthetic invention concocted from organic materials, Imipolex-G does not have a clear or stable place in The Chain. Does it belong on The Chain near organic matter? Or someplace else since man made it? The plastic is not an employment of organic matter to serve mankind’s uses such as one creates paper by pulping the organic substance of trees, but in fact a new creation born at the hands, and from the mind, of human scientists. The former example is ordained by the universe because as man is higher on The Chain they have authority to use organic matter, but the act of creating it is resigned to the entity highest on The Chain: God. Jamf dares to act as a being higher status than himself. Scientists working off of Jamf’s invention during the war were “no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have and then go ahead and build  it” (Pynchon 253). God was no longer the only one with the power of creation, which meant man was no longer subject to Nature’s limitations as “Pretty soon a whole family of ‘aromatic polymers’ had arisen”, and mankind had fully disrupted the order carefully prescribed by The Chain. 

How poetic is it that the item man creates to disrupt the all powerful Chain of Being is in fact a chain itself? Well, I’ll let you decide for yourself on Pynchon’s level of poeticism, but the layered metaphor is fascinating, and I like to believe the ‘ol Bard himself would smile knowingly at this section of the novel. The production of the plastic is described in a physical manner of looping and manipulating natural chemicals into new shapes dictated by scientists. The infantile thought-child of the plastic started out with Jamf thinking about chains as he “among others, then proposed, logically, dialectically, taking the parental polyamide sections of the new chain and looping them around into rings too, giant ‘heterocyclic’ rings, to alternate with the aromatic rings” which was the “One hypothetical chain that Jamf came up with” and “was later modified into Imipolex-G” (Pynchon 253). In Gravity’s Rainbow scientists are breaking a chain on a molecular level as well as a metaphorical level. Reading the novel through a Shakespearean lens, WWII is the cataclysmic result of a fracture in the Great Chain of Being. Think back to the Macbeth example. When Macbeth killed King Duncan he broke the chain by killing the highest ranked human on that plane of existence. The morning his body is found characters notice the horrible storm of the night before:

“The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death,

And prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion and confused events

New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird

Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth

Was feverous and did shake” (II.iii Macbeth) .

The night is ripped open by nature’s rage over Macbeth’s deeds with howling winds and an earthquake. This scene mirrors the chaos depicted in the opening scene of Gravity’s Rainbow. The line “lamentings heard i’the air; strange screams of death” is replaced by “A screaming comes across the sky”. Scenes of wartime evacuation evoke the same sense of upheaval. Put Pynchon’s words in poetic lineation, and it even looks Shakespearean:

“There are no lights inside the cars. 

No lights anywhere…

But it’s night.

He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon–it will be a spectacle:

The fall of a crystal palace.

But coming down in total blackout

Without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing” (Pynchon 3).

WWII is the result of The Great Chain breaking. Mankind steps out of line and the world is shredded to bits by warfare. It is a direct sign that the cosmic balance of the universe is in turmoil. War is the ultimate symbol for instability and disorder. The invention of the new plastic was highly unnatural in the scope of The Great Chain, so the resulting actions of the war is the unnatural response of the universe. In Macbeth, the unnatural takes form with animals acting strangely, “A falcon towering in her pride of place,/Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed” and the murdered king’s horses “Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race/ Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out/Contending ‘gainst obedience as they would make/war on mankind…Tis said they ate each other” (Act 2, scene iv 11-18). Animals lower on The Chain attacking and killing ones above, and horses, a creature prided on their ability to be tamed to man’s will refuses the bridle. For Pynchon, unnatural occurrences manifest in the grotesque destruction brought forth from the V-2 rockets. With the rockets, the boundaries of the battlefield are blurred as death and annihilation moves beyond just soldiers in the trenches. Civilians and soldiers alike cower in the V-2 rocket’s bloody shadow. I shiver at calling war before the World Wars as “natural”, but the invention of a weapon that can raze a city to the ground in a matter of minutes from launch is more unnatural than the cannibalism of horses. The present chaos Pirate Prentice and company find themselves in is punishment for the sins of Jamf and other far reaching scientists who invented the substance that insulated V-2 rockets thus allowing the wreckage to compound itself.  . The offense of Imipolex-G is compounded as it is the invented substance that aides further destruction by insulating the V-2 rocket.

Lazlo Jamf with one hand created a chain, and with the other broke one.