ABSTRACT
The house where Leopold and Molly live is worth more than theusual attention we might devote to a house in fiction. In a sense the house on Eccles Street, which was demolished in the 1960s, isn’t so much fictional as factual, or, rather, historical. Indeed, its realistic texture casts a shadow over our reading of Ulysses. So becoming acquainted with the house can be rewarding not only in itself but also for the light it sheds on the characters themselves. Joyce we know delighted in playing with the relationship between reality and fiction, and as a result the more we know about the reality he’s employing the more we know about the fiction he’s creating. Of course, we have to pinch ourselves occasionally and remember that Ulysses is a work of fiction, that the Blooms never existed and that the house on Eccles Street was never occupied by them. But that, too, is part of the enjoyment in reading Joyce, a process of entanglement and disentanglement. There is something else, for in reconstructing the stage-set for Ulysses we can discern how the pieces fit together and relate to each other. Indeed, as we move ever further away from that period we can derive yet more pleasure from what might be called historical excavation work. Oh, so this is how people lived at that time, before the coming of the cinema, radio, television. Equally, the extraordinary attention to everyday life in Ulysses means that the novel can be used to reconstruct what life was like in the Edwardian period, so that in getting close to Bloom’s immediate environment we are getting close to a whole world which, like the house itself, has now passed.
