In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts." But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).
So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.
It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.
I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence."
UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."
DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal." Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.
It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound."
So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above.
HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.
LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived.
I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.
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