Isaac Asimov's "The Mule": Intergalactic Demagogue

I'm almost finished with my re-read of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. I realize now that I prefer the first book to the latter two. The first book is more widely historical in range. It doesn't feel to me to be a sustained, novel-length narrative, which these days I have less patience for. In my own writing, I try to maximize narrative potential with as little words as possible. The first book, The Foundation, feels to me more a collection of loosely knit short stories than two serialized novels, which is what I think the latter two novels are: two longer narratives sutured together.

Don't get me wrong. I still appreciate Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. I'm particularly intrigued by the character of "The Mule," the mutant military dictator who is able to manipulate emotions. I'm going to focus on him in this post.

It's intriguing to me, this idea that one person can influence history drastically. "The Mule" is a kind of wild card, a variable not accounted for in Hari Seldon's plan for the establishment of a Second Empire. I love the symbolism derived from The Mule's incognito persona, the court clown "Magnifico Giganticus." "The Mule" is wearing motley and is parading around as a clown. He is literally the joker thrown into the deck of playing cards that is history.

I think Asimov's portrayal of The Mule syncs with some very genuine fears that Americans had about political leaders in the late 40s and early 50s: hyper-charismatic demagogues who had set themselves up over the masses had whipped whole populations into an emotional ecstasy/frenzy. Some were eager to interpret such large personalities as the cause of WWII, a horror that the world was still very much recovering from when Asimov was writing his story.

I wonder if The Mule can be seen as an allegory for interwar political leaders--deadly speakers, deadly showman--like Mussolini, Stalin, FDR, Hitler, Churchill, Huey Long, and so forth.

But strangely, the ability of The Mule to manipulate the emotions of large swaths of humanity is a power that is not necessarily evil in and of itself. The true evil, rather, is the Mule's psychological problems. These make his ability to manipulate others dangerous. Because of his childhood, his experiences connected with his deformities, his alienation from the rest of humanity, he becomes an antagonizing ego-maniac who resents the rest of humanity. The Second Foundationers change his mind so that he becomes, in the end, a benevolent dictator. But this plot point carries with it an implication: the ability of a leader to manipulate whole groups of people is not intrinsically evil or suspicious; rather, it's this rare ability married with a the wrong psychological makeup.

In any case, The Mule is an interesting imaginary version of a category of political leader--the charismatic great leader who seems to be able to channel history--that intrigues us, disturbs us, frightens us, and enchants us.

Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*: Reconciling the Macroscopic and Microscopic

I started re-reading Isaac Asimov's famous novel of galactic empire, Foundation. I love this novel.

Asimov's Foundation epitomizes the "space opera," a sub-genre infamously difficult to pin down. Of course, there are other versions of the "space opera" that predate Asimov's Foundation series that only vaguely resemble it (the key family resemblance being, of course, that they are all, loosely defined, adventures in "outer space"). There are C.L. Moore's "interplanetary" stories of Northwest Smith of Earth (1930s), and, of course, there are Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular "Barsoom" stories, which were originally published in the all-fiction Munsey magazine, The All-story in February of 1912.

These older "space operas" are much more "operatic" than Asimov, which is less concerned about human interest and more concerned with sociological issues: the rise and fall of governments, the emergence of specific cultures, the effect of technological change on material economies, and so forth. Foundation has more in common in terms of genre with Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire than with Moore or Burroughs, to an extent.

In another post about my favorite Asimov short story, "The Last Question," I wrote, "Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river." As far as Foundation is concerned, this is overstatement. In Foundation, human beings are a force, are referred to as a "conglomerate" whose actions can be predicted with some accuracy based upon statistics. This is Hari Seldon's famous "psychohistory," a kind of super-mathematical historiography that doesn't only deal with the past but makes predictions about the future.

The interesting thing that Asimov does in these Foundation stories, to my mind, is to imagine a reconciliation between that age-old historical question: does history move forward because of significant figures (e.g. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler); or, does history move forward because of sociological/economic laws that disregard individuals. In other words, he uses literature to negotiate the apparently incommensurate "mascoscopic" approach to history (sociology, economy, ecology) and microscopic approach (biography, great persons).

That's what good literature does: it allows us to think things hitherto unthinkable.