The Joycean Society   is about a reading group. It opens with little in the way of preliminaries: in its cut-to-the-chase opening scene, members from the group are discussing a recent news article on Damien Hirst. The problem with artists like Hirst, they say, is that they make too much money, and become removed from the quotidian that informs their art. By becoming successful, they lose their ability to produce. Tad, self-assured, American, is about to suggest what Hirst could do next when he is interrupted: Hirst needn’t do anything next. He’s already loaded.

The Zurich James Joyce Foundation reading group has been running for some thirty years. It is on its third ‘lap’, as its lionine leader Fritz Senn puts it, of Finnegans Wake , James Joyce’s notoriously opaque final novel. Neither a study of the novel nor its author, The Joycean Society takes as its subject the group of readers. Finnegans Wake may be notorious, but filmaker Dora Garcia wanted the focus of the film to be the people. We see them greet each other, and take their places in the library. The Foundation occupies the second floor of the building (third floor to our American readers) and at one point in The Joycean Society a member asks Fritz to ‘install a lift, for the old folks’. The two youngest members of the group — Sabrina, who works at the Foundation, and Marc, a student at the Universitat Zurich — settle politely among the more august readers, listening to a nostalgia that has surely been turned up for the cameras. As the group get to discussing a recent London Review of Books article, pondering the validity of smoke up the anus as a method of testing for death, the visuals change to a shot of Joyce’s grave at Fluntern cemetery. Snow is falling.

A moment for full disclosure: I spent time at the Zurich Foundation on a scholarship the summer after graduating from my BA, and have myself attended the reading group.

Garcia’s portrayal is subtle. Watching a film about people one knows, or at least one as met, normally feels faintly voyeuristic; a moment of pleasant familiarity twinned with the uncanniness of seeing a friend on screen. In this case, however, I felt reduced — and this I mean as a compliment — to the level of audience. Often the best pieces of art are those that force us to see anew things we’ve seen before. Often the best uses of screens are those that, true to their name, veil as well as reveal. The Joycean Society does both. The film alternates between shots of book covers, hands, members’ faces; at moments intimate, at moments not. On the evenings which Garcia filmed, the group was reading from Anna Livia’s portion of the book. Does the film’s average viewer know what they are referencing when they count a list of girls’ names, looking for twenty-eight? ( FW 202:5-19, for those so inclined). No explanation is offered, although everyone on screen seems to understand. For a seasoned reader, of course, the natural reaction to a list of Wakean girls’ names is to count them. Perhaps this is what Garcia means when she suggests that the film raises questions of the world outside the group, or how the group constructs a world. Finnegans Wake has an internal logic; so do reading groups.

The Joycean Society may focus on the readers rather than the book, but it is thus nevertheless concerned with stories. Its screening at the Picturehouse marked the launch of Twenty-three million, five hundred eighty-six thousand, four hundred and ninety stories (2013 – ongoing), an app which is able to generate stories from collected fragments. In this spirit, The Joycean Society was followed by a screening of John Cage’s 1978 Interview Performance , in which Cage speaks to biographer Richard Kostelanetz about the creation of his works which use the Wake . The interview-performance — at one point the two men ask which it is — is tremendous. Cage is fastidious in his generative mood, describing his complex methodology in detail. In answer to Kostelanetz’ whispered questions (he, quietened by Laryngitis, is amplified) Cage describes a process which involves counting the words of the Wake,  searching mathematically for particular features which are then transferred to his poems. There is something of the stamp collector about Cage here; his talk is lengthy, laying out each step of his methodology as if slotting it delicately into place with tweezers. Not everyone was keen, however. When this second film finished, the man in front of me audibly whispered ‘thank God that’s over’, and I was left to ponder what makes a reading group or an app interesting while a mechanised (or mechanising) man — surely in some ways a happy medium — is not.

To return then to The Joycean Society . The film is not entirely focused on the Augustinergasse library — there are, as I have said, shots of Fluntern cemetery; but there are also short clips of people speaking separately about Joyce and the group. Cleverly, Garcia has left the chatter of the group-in-progress running under these, as if they may be in just the next room (indeed, it’s only my familiarity with the Foundation that allows me to know better). One of these features the Joyce scholar Geert Lernout; another features Fritz himself. There’s an uncomfortable resonance of the real and the virtual at this moment. Fritz is expressing a sentiment he’s expressed elsewhere : that the reading group is a form of therapy, that it allows people a space to speak. That it gives something to its members which, for various reasons, they may have been unable to get elsewhere.

Reading groups make worlds just as they turn away from them. The Wake, too.

It’s always been this way. Most readers of Dubliners can’t see snow falling on a graveyard without thinking of the end of ‘The Dead’. While at the Foundation I worked on the papers of Frank Budgen, painter and friend of Joyce; now snow falling on Fluntern, specifically, reminds me instead of him. After Joyce’s death, Budgen published a tribute in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine which opens with snow melting on the Zuri’berg . His prose is beautiful and evocative, textured as if by mountain streams (‘The Fohn wind will blow and the Glarus mountains light up. ‘Sechselauten’ is coming’). He recounts memories of Joyce first in Zurich and then Paris, and ends thus:

We left the flat together and walked over the bridge to the left bank. Joyce tapped the pavement repeatedly with his new snakewood stick, a prized acquisition. I told him the only stick I possessed was an olive branch. A suitable companion, he thought. He suggested that I should write an article on Finnegans Wake and entitle it James Joyce’s Book of the Dead. We dawdled citywards. I had a rendezvous at the Dome and Joyce one with Paul Leon. All dawdling in Paris ends in taxis. Joyce set me down at the Dome and waved out of the traffic jam, ‘Lots of fun.’ Newly initiated I gave the response, ‘At Finnegan’s Wake’.

Stephanie Boland is an editor at  Don’t Do It