The Foreign Service Journal, September 2011

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 first few (easy) chapters and plowed into — let’s admit it — horrific slogs in chapters like “Cyclops” and “Oxen in the Sun,” some of the true mudflats of modern literature. (Not to throw stones at a literary master, but if even fellow novel- ist Vladimir Nabokov, no slouch at composing difficult, opaque novels, could call Ulysses “needlessly obscure” in places, I think I might be permitted to cast a pebble or two Joyce’s way.) I settled into my job, accompanying the ambassador to hear the latest from senior Iraqi political leaders, offering con- dolences to a shocked minister of foreign affairs who’d had his ministry blown up by al-Qaida, or negotiating in smoke- filled backrooms with members of Parliament for the last- minute compromises on an election law necessary to organize the critical March 2010 national elections. (While the elec- toral process was successful, the post-elec- tion government formation saga con- tinued for nine long months, partially re- opening questions about the future of democratic governance in Iraq we thought the elections had answered.) I enjoyed my job and also savored my opportunities — severely constricted by security concerns — to get out and about, whether for a dinner of masgouf (flame- seared carp from the Tigris) with an Iraqi artist at his gallery, or flying upcountry in Black Hawk helicopters to Diyala province with a group of U.S. senators on a fact-finding trip. And I continued to read Joyce, usually for an hour or two on weekend mornings. It became my refuge, a place to go when there were no trips on the itinerary and when I couldn’t face the dreary embassy compound (with an architectural ambiance that combined the look of a rundown community college with that of a maximum security prison), the 120-degree heat or my overflowing inbox. Initially seduced by the novel’s reputation, then challenged by its complexity and daunting charms, I eventually fell for its lusty modernist elegance and allusive sass. A similar tra- jectory (minus the elegance and sass) would describe my evolving feelings toward Iraq during my stay. There is a fuzzy, sometimes maddening quality to Joyce’s writing. You are never quite sure where you are. You have the sense of what is going on — a chat over breakfast, an ar- gument at a newspaper office, an academic lecture on Shake- speare, drunken conversations in numerous Dublin bars — but it is never completely clear. You can spend lots of time reading sentences that don’t seem to hang together so well or offer much meaning. And yet the sense of Bloom’s thoughts and concerns comes across. That repeated sensation reminded me of our weekly pol- icy videoconferences with Washington, which often seemed to resemble a cacophony of drunken stories colliding in a bar, together with enough certainty and considered policy views to fill a universe of beer mugs or briefing books. Great Obsessions As I continued reading Joyce, another great mythic slog of a novel, HermanMelville’s Moby Dick , came to mind. Many of us in Embassy Baghdad over the years have felt like first mates, or sometimes just galley helpers, on this rocking, pitch- ing Pequod , as we pursued our great obsessions: to bring and entrench democracy, to deal a death-blow to Arab rejection- ism and so on. There have been captains who knew what they were doing, assuming command midway through; those who scaled back the distance of the voyage and used knowledge of the dangerous shoals, talented dead reckoning or good instincts gained from previous ventures to navigate. One more novel, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom , comes to mind in re- flecting on our project in Iraq — or it did once while I was jogging around our out- sized compound, listening with typical iPod eclecticism to Jimi Hendrix and Justin Bieber, during a lull in the mortar rounds that periodically rocked the em- bassy. Like Ulysses , the Faulkner novel is a great, fractured piece of storytelling that describes on a mythic scale an obsessive, hubristic — and in this instance, doomed — attempt to conquer the land and plant the seeds for future prosperity. Like Thomas Sutpen’s plantation, the embassy rises up from the flat, dusty earth at a still point in the Green Zone, a monstrous slab of brown stone and steel, imperial and brooding. Like the situation we find ourselves in here in Iraq, hemmed in and defined by facts on the ground and grainy, stubborn realities, so, too, Joyce’s Ulysses , despite its vast Ho- meric parallels and elaborate architecture of symbol and al- lusion, is a book of pungent earthiness and facts. It features a famous scene where the hero, Leopold Bloom, sits on Sandymount Beach, trying to look up Gerty McDowell’s skirt. Like Bloom on the beach, there is a certain reality we find ourselves in right now. Regardless of the grandiose ambitions that spawned this sprawling, seemingly never-ending project, it has also been shaped by gritty, insis- tent realities that sometimes mugged the beautiful theories justifying the initial adventure. And like Leopold spotting Gerty’s undies, we have our interests, things we are looking out for, so to speak. The novel has lots of sentences that don’t seem to hang together or offer much meaning — much like our weekly policy videoconferences with Washington.