From his vantage point among the defeated, William Faulkner became one of the most perceptive observers of the evolution of American civilization this country has yet to produce. Like a latter day Ibn Khaldun, Faulkner composed a mythical macrohistory of America, "built around the conflict between traditionalism and the antitraditional modern world in which it is immersed" (Faulkner, edited by Robert Penn Warren (1966), 23).
For Faulkner, "traditionalism" entails acting "always with an ethically responsible will...[a] vital morality, humanism" (ibid., 24). "Antitraditionalism," on the other hand, involves "acting only for self-interest": it is "amoral" and "animalistic" (ibid).
The novelist personified these two antagonistic forces as families: the traditionalist Sartorises and the antitraditionalist Snopeses. "And the Sartoris-Snopes conflict is fundamentally a struggle between humanism and naturalism" (ibid). For Faulkner, humanism was essentially Romantic: informed by notions of chivalry and noblesse oblige. By contrast, his "naturalism" was "entrepreneurial" and characterized by a "low cunning" that regarded other human beings as means, not ends.
In novel after novel, he developed this mythos of the decline of the Sartorises and the ascendancy of the Snopeses and, in so doing, chronicled the downward course of America's "spiritual history."
Sic transit gloria mundi: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
