Vicking With the Censors: Joyce’s Bold Use of the Suppressed in an Unsuppressed Finnegans Wake

Because of its daunting linguistic ambiguity, Finnegans Wake often seems designed merely to baffle. The story’s polysemous complexity, however, may be Joyce’s most potent weapon against censorship. Insinuated throughout the indecipherable narration are sexual terms that were essentially unprintable in 1939. The highly charged diction, moreover, often proceeds to fuse with sly allusions to authors whose works were censored or banned, from Ovid to Edgar Quinet. This veiled aspect only intensifies as apparently unrelated paronomasia references entities that were also once forbidden; items like Eve’s apple, hootch, fez hats, and slot machines constantly cross the narrator’s mind. Through ingeniously subversive language, which can never be precisely pinned down, the text daringly invites—and simultaneously thwarts—its own bowdlerization.