In 2020, during my first re-read of Finnegans Wake since about 2006, I ran across a sentence that I later described as “overwhelming” me, such that I had to put the book down.

The context for understanding this sentence is an earlier sentence:

Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord.

As I have explained in another post, the Fall powers the universe. It puts out the energy that the force called ALP shapes into something productive: even though “Humpty shell fall frumpty times […] there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come tomourn him.”

“Grampupus” sounds like pupa, the universe contained in a cocoon, the singularity that preceded the Big Bang, the Cosmic Egg that contains all potential. “Sprids” joins “spreads” and “rids,” indicating the work of ALP (driving both the Fall and Redemption). “Grinny” suggests not just “granny” — an older form of ALP responsible for gather the pieces of the Fall that she precipitated — but also an attitude toward this process of manifestation: grinning through it all.

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The sentence that plays off this one occurs in Chapter 3. In a description of HCE – the replacement of Finnegan – we are told that after his crime, he was put on trial and acquitted, but the populace turned against him and tore him apart. And in the description, amid several echoes of Finnegan’s wake from the first chapter, this sentence appears:

Longtong’s breach is fallen down, but Graunya’s spreed’s abroad.

This sentence is articulating the same principle as the earlier sentence, just on a lower “level.”

The Grampupus sentence is talking about the cosmic level: the Fall sets the universe into motion, creating the feast that is our lives (and we are the “brekkers” of Humpty Dumpty insofar as by living we participate in the energy created by his Fall, and we ourselves reiterate and re-enact that fall in our lives, with every story).

The Longtong sentence is a level further down: London is HCE in the geopolitical realm, the imperial metropole. Grinny has become the Graun Ya (the great Yes, as voiced by Molly Bloom as the last word of Ulysses, the joyous affirmation of existence that runs under all manifestation). London/Longtong is Every City, Every Imperial Center. When the Great City, when the Great Empire, is “breached” and has fallen, the Great Yes speeds abroad as power becomes decentralized and the democratic period begins (Vico’s third age, the one we’re living in, the one that contains the seeds of the collapse of civilization into chaos and the start of the whole cycle again).

“Spreeds” additionally suggests sprees, reads, and breeds (maybe increased intermixing of peoples as the concept of a racial us/them sustaining Empire breaks down).

By repeating that earlier sentence in modified form — a technique employed throughout the book — Finnegans Wake performs the repetition of the past in new guises, as well as the reverberation of the same event from different points of view (which might be a different way of saying “repeating the past in new guises”; from our point of view, within history, events are sequential and linear, but from a perspective outside of time, all events are concurrent and/or are different ways of viewing the same event, the Fall/Redemption; art is a means of accessing that “outside-of-time” perspective).

And speaking of different perspectives, this sentence also works as a dirty joke: HCE with his “long tong” of a tool has dropped his breeches, watching as ALP “spreads a broad” (the two girls engaging in sex in the Park). In one sentence, Joyce addresses various levels at once: the cosmic, the imperial/political, the scandalous, and the childish (riffing on a nursery rhyme like “London Bridge”). It’s as if each of these levels contains the others, and all of them are conveyed in the iterations, reiterations, and permutations of Joyce’s text.