Mammonart

Mammonart. An Essay in Economic Interpretation is a book of literary criticism by the American novelist, journalist, and political activist Upton Sinclair. He offers his assessments, from a socialist point of view, of 85 past "great authors" from Europe and the United States.

Background

In the late 1910s and 1920s, Sinclair wrote a series of books about American institutions and culture: The Profits of Religion, The Brass Check, The Goose-step, The Goslings, Mammonart, and Money Writes!. He called these books the "Dead Hand" series—a sardonic derivation of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that guides capitalism.

Sinclair's title merges "Mammon" and "art" to emphasize how art has always been, in his estimation, commodified and controlled by the wealthy. He begins the book with a framing device in the form of an extended allegory. It is, according to his biographer Anthony Arthur: Mammonart is interspersed with brief dialogues between a modern-day Mr. and Mrs. Ogi, as represented by Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig. They trade quips and barbs in a kind of running commentary on the book and on the history of art.
In the majority of chapters, there is a short biography and critique of a famous writer from the past. Sinclair's assessment depends on how he measures that writer's level of support for the rich and powerful. He asserts that throughout history, most artists have not challenged the status quo, but instead took apolitical positions such as "art for art's sake" or "art is entertainment". From Sinclair's perspective, such artists perpetuated injustice and inequality no matter how beautiful the work they created. For example, in his chapter on Shakespeare entitled "Phosphorescence and Decay", Sinclair praises the poet-playwright's glorious facility with words, but claims that Shakespeare's talent "saved him the need of thinking". In contrast, Dickens' unique contribution was to "force into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich and respectable."
Mammonart is notable for Sinclair's repeated statement that all art, including his own, is propaganda. The popular distinction between "pure and unsullied creative artists" like Shakespeare and Goethe, and "propagandists" like Jesus and Tolstoi, "is purely a class distinction and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards of art and of life."
The list of artists that Sinclair discusses is similar to, though shorter than, a 1940 list of Great Books. He also adds several writers who contemporary readers might deem of lesser importance, but who were regarded in the 1920s as part of the American literary canon.
Artists discussed:

In the last chapter, Sinclair says he wrote Mammonart as a "text-book of culture". He predicts that it will be used as a Russian high school text-book "within six months", and will be adopted by the rest of Europe "as soon as the social revolution comes".

Critical reception

As a self-described work of propaganda, Mammonart was mostly ignored by critics. Current History included a one-paragraph summary stating, "Mr. Sinclair contends that all art is propaganda, no matter how carefully disguised or how great the artist's devotion to the theory of 'art for art's sake.'"
In The New English Weekly, the literary scholar Herbert Read accused Sinclair of denigrating outstanding writers out of spite, because "no critic of importance has ever mistaken for an artist. He is the poète manqué, the cock without a comb. The midden he crows on is immense, but it is muck." A reviewer in the Sydney Bulletin offered a more generous interpretation, suggesting that Sinclair's book was often informative and amusing "if you drop entirely his theory".

Legacy

Mammonart was reprinted in paperback in 2003 by Simon Publications. In 2022, the book was made available on Project Gutenberg.

Quotations

"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda."
"Great art is produced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put across with technical competence in terms of the art selected."
On his enjoyment of John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, "One does not escape the need of personal morality by espousing proletarian revolution."

Mammonart

Background

Contents

Critical reception

Legacy

Quotations