The Long Maori Renaissance

Abstract

After his dramatic gesture of exile in 1902, James Joyce returned to Ireland twice in 1909, on the second occasion, in October, as agent for four Triestine businessmen whom he had talked into financing Dublin’s first cinema. Joyce’s entrepreneurial career was short-lived; the Volta Theatre at 45 Mary Street failed after a few months, having featured mainly Italian films.¹ Part of what Joyce had left behind in flying, first to Paris then to Trieste, was the claim of the Irish Renaissance—his speculative cinematic venture demonstrating (apart from a willingness, surprising in a socialist, to act on behalf of international capital) a resistance to the notion that the Irish people needed to consume images of Ireland. Yet Joyce’s postexile fiction is so supersaturated in the material of his country that it has been subsumed over the course of a century into the iconography of literary (and cinematic) Ireland. Bloomsday is now a Dublin tourist event while phrases from Ulysses are printed on the upholstery of Aer Lingus planes. Even his abandonment has become part of national mythology.