Reflections on European Modernity and its Impact on Premodern Sensibility and Society

Abstract

The idea of literature as a record of collective human consciousness is a departure from the Eurocentric enunciation of realism and individualism. This proposition reflects an artistic reaction whose implications pose challenge at philosophical and epistemological planes against all those concepts, ideas and notions that went into the making of European Enlightenment and Humanism. Of all the great Latin American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing can be read as a critique of the values of Modernity and Enlightenment, which the paper intends to explore, in opposition to which postmodern, poststructural and postcolonial thoughts have developed their critical discourses. In the novelistic form, involving a very nuanced reaction against European art and thought, Marquez has tried to capture a vanishing Premodern human sensibility in a mode that is both comic and tragic, fantastic and realistic. He allegorieses the loss of an organic mode of life which could not survive the moment it came into contact with the outside world. At a symbolic level, it suggests alienation and death of the ethnic communities and racial groups, disintegration of the native culture and indigenous pattern of life, which the paper will discuss, in the age of globalisation and growing integration of the world. The whole experience is so cataclysmic that it generates a deep sense of remorse and nostalgia in the reader. Marquez not only makes one conscious of the rupture at the level of human perception, his narrative contains element of parody of the discourse of progress, European scientific and psychological thoughts.