/lit/ - Literature

The most beautiful pieces of literature always engage in a sort of "emotional realism". They represent human passion, irrationality, courage, and perseverance as triumphing even over the fetters of reality. King Lear, for example, though he is old and weak by the end of the play, becomes reinvigorated with love for his daughter to the point of killing the two young soldiers who are sent to hang her. Here the corporeal elements of human existence, such as the decaying elderly body of Lear, which so restrict us and make life so dull, are overthrown by the emotional forces of passion, courage, and love.
Some more examples:
>In Ivanhoe the Knight Templar suddenly dies in a jousting tournament: "Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions."
>In The Prisoner of Chillon by Lord Byron, the prisoner tears his metal chains apart in order to go to the body of his brother.
Ultimately, then, great art can be characterised as a subversion of reason, an attempt to represent the world in terms of passion, curiosity, wonder, and mystery, which is the way our unscientific primitive ancestors saw the world. This all makes for a sublimely emotional impact, and it is why Don Quixote begins as a great book and ends as a horrible one: Cervantes, by having Don Quixote realise he was "insane" and restoring him back to reality, commits treachery against art, for he sides with reason over passion.