Upton Sinclair on Guy de Maupassant

In the chapter of Mammonart that Upton Sinclair devotes to the career and work of Guy de Maupassant Sinclair pays tribute to de Maupassant's technical command of the short story--the French writer "master of the . . . form," for "No one has been able to pack more meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words." However, Sinclair also treats him as terribly limited in other ways, asking of the "young writers of short stories" who study his work to learn from that master "What has he to give them--aside from the tricks of the trade?" and answering, as he holds that de Maupassant himself would have answered, "Nothing." In spite of his "art for art's sake" views Maupassant has a "propaganda," a Message, just "as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi," but alas, a worse than worthless one, namely "that life is a cheat and a snare," a view that Sinclair sees as not just leaving his work a body of brilliant technique and no more, but as having destroyed Maupassant himself (put him "in a strait-jacket at forty," and in his grave in Paris' Montparnasse Cemetery not very long after).

Where did Maupassant's come from? As it happens Sinclair significantly arranged his book so that the chapter on Maupassant came immediately after the chapter on Emile Zola and began with the question "What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope?" with de Maupassant's life and work the answer. Especially given what Sinclair has to say about artistic pessimism in his subsequent book, Money Writes!, there is a fairly obvious, if implicit, social criticism in that, namely that the writer taking the social world as it is, and accepting that this is all it can be, ever, can scarcely feel anything but pessimism--with, perhaps, the life-as-a-cheat-and-snare aspect of that pessimism saying something of capitalism specifically, or at least aspects of its essence that were to become clearer later and elsewhere than in the France of Maupassant's day. An economic system that lives on the basis of an individualistic aspirationalism that is endlessly exploited and endlessly disappointed, an advertising-consumer culture that ceaselessly cultivates intense desires for products that can never live up to expectations and whose satisfactions are designed to be disposable so as to keep the consumer on an endless treadmill of wanting and getting, can seem to very easily produce a "cheat and snare" view of life in a person without social vision, for which what is really just "society" is instead Life.