Joyce's Dublin was in fact an eighteenth century parody. The technique he developed, the technique which underlies everything from the first pages of Dubliners to the end of Finnegans Wake, came out of the subject: parody: double-writing. The music-halls parodied the heroic dramas; Joyce parodied the music-halls. Journalism parodied heroic elegance: Joyce parodied journalism. He focussed, that is to say, on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. All his characters are walking clichés, because the Dubliners were; a Leopold Bloom is simultaneously a "case" and a person. All his dialogue is an assemblage of locutions reçues into unexpected patterns: unexpected because he was dealing with human beings, whose natural spontaneity the past could not quite batten down:

- Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.

- It is, Bloom said.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. . . . Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the ethereal. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirty-five thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like till you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right, then bear chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks over barrels, through wirefences, obstacle race. U273/264. (Dublin's Joyce)