Within Finnegans Wake, Joyce grants special narrative powers to Issy, the young girl character in the book. A victim of incest at the hands of her father and brothers, Issy speaks with subversive intent that is particularly helpful to Joyce as he simultaneously articulates and undermines notions of control and mastery in narrative. Joyce bestows on Issy authorial knowledge that is not available to other characters. In fact, Issy knows what she cannot know as a character within a text: she knows the sigla Joyce used in his Finnegans Wake notebooks. When designing the novel, a process he described to patron Harriet Shaw Weaver as a mathematical problem akin to squaring the circle, Joyce used these emblems to represent characters and concepts.1 Writing in a footnote, Issy comments on The Doodles family, giving the sigla for her father, her mother, herself, the four old men, the book, and her two brothers.2 She should not know this information: talking about herself as if she had read her author's preparatory material, Issy disrupts readers' expectations of what comprises proper knowledge for a character. Improper knowledge, in fact, defines Issy. Her wealth of sexual information reveals both how her sexuality is regulated by the social norms of patriarchy and how she subverts those norms, for while her knowledge may appear to cast her as essentially erotic, it also becomes the ground from which she speaks a disruptive story that threatens the gendered economy of power in Finnegans Wake. Joyce configures Issy according to a revision of the psychological models historically available to him, models that combine disruptive speech with hysteria and thus with unbridled sexuality. Within the novel, Joyce uses incest as a metaphor through which he articulates both his desire for this subversion and his opposition to it. That is, like an incestuous father, Joyce seeks to control and to possess the desired daughter who never can be fully controlled, for she always possesses the dangerous potential to betray the father and overthrow his authority by speaking his secrets. Incest within the novel thus names not only a