"Expressive implication" herein means that an individual or the social totality expresses acceptance of reality through a moderate image of unreality. By unreality is not here meant the fictionality of literature. It may refer to any imaginary or dreamlike quality of experience of a protagonist, but only if that particular vision is driven by unchecked desire or aggression. The unreality simply means a central wish that is contrary to the fled truths of the situation. There is, however, in the consumption of drama and literature a common sense that wishes to know no more about the process of revelation than the pleasure in seeing self-deception shattered and punished. How is this interest to be pushed aside for the sake of the true object of theory? It is not sufficient to rule out this simple yet important satisfaction to set it down as moral and not aesthetic, but more helpful to note that it does not explain the interest in the unpunished deception itself before anything is disclosed. Perhaps that common interest in concealment and suspense is only understood as a variant on the direct interest in gratification and discovery. It does not constitute an implicit interest in concealment as such. In both the comic and tragic situation the protagonist presents himself to himself and others as better than he really is. But that is only to outline the structure of truth and deception. It does not truly theorize about those facts, to speak of the meaning of the instinct of deception, or will of the protagonist to be otherwise than they are.
Psychoanalysis, a major hermeneutics of suspicion, is worthy of a certain insight given the centrality of deceptive struggle. But that is really not because ordinary life conceals and adjusts the primal drives, so much as the opposite, that those drives conceal the world from themselves. Yet, in the first place, it clearly mistakes tragic situations for expressions of repressed fantasy (and has been driven back by all sorts of theoretical reactions), while in the second place it has no notion of this or any conflict as the present sense of expression of acceptance of reality. On the contrary, it would seem that for psychoanalysis adjustment and acceptance are the negative of art and creativity. But the very opposite is true -- adjustment, the overcoming of sick and evil impulses, is more at the root of literary creation than is maladjustment. Such a formula as this acceptance of reality is thus entirely alien and contrary to psychoanalytic thought. In the best possible role that one may attribute to psychoanalysis as a theory of the tragic, the pathos surrounding repressed fantasy is presented as such because it shows that the audience, or the author himself, is a tragic person like the protagonist. That particular result is analogous to the now familiar theory of literature as "acknowledgment of life," associated with Walter Kaufmann and various scholars who do not even know of Kaufmann. Psychoanalysis is a form of criticism or theory only by transferring the pathos of the work onto the audience and the author. But where this leaves us is with only extensions of the terrible and of pathos, not an explanation of what those experiences ultimately mean.
In other words, a psychoanalytic criticism --- like all other theory hitherto --- does not allow pathos to stand out from life, but flatly embeds it in experience as mere event and lifeless or soulless material. This is unsurprising in the case of psychoanalysis because of its naturalistic origins and gestures.
The classic case of the hermeneutics of suspicion is the psychoanalytic approach to Hamlet. The view advanced by this method is that Hamlet's murderous uncle embodies Hamlet's own repressed incestuous fantasy, so that he hesitates to murder the uncle because he would be killing an aspect of himself. The method has therefore uncovered an entirely separate extension of the other apparent expressions of pathos, that is, the general gloom of the protagonist and his suicidal ideations. That familiar area of pathos, which is already known, remains untouched by the psychoanalytic move. It is uninvolved in this new disclosure and therefore unexplained. Yet for neither of these two instances of struggle or pathos does the method of suspicion provide an explanation in the sense of the meaning of the situation giving rise to the conflicts and painful passions. The passions themselves are disclosed, along with their causes and effects. Of their significance, which constitutes the significance of the aesthetic itself, we are told nothing by such an approach.
Among the meanings that implication has normally had, there has never been an appropriate conceptual basis for expressive implication in notions of the latter term. The senses in which implication has been used seem to strike around this idea in interesting ways but they do not suggest it, do not "imply" it at all, so to speak.
Inquiring into the meaning of "implication" one encounters the difference between the implicit as the inherent or intrinsic, and on the other hand as the cryptic and enigmatic. These seem to be the widest divergence of meanings of this word. Yet while the latter is surely significant as an area of richness and meaning native to myth, the enigmatic or gnomic itself suggests nothing distinctly of implication’s most important sense, if that is expressive implication.
In previous theory, in particular the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion, implication is the access or locale of infrastructure, the latter an underlying force or hidden aspect of, for example, mind, society, text, or morality. Implication itself would be of direct interest only if that which underlies and is implicit is not something to be excavated or cured as a sickness, but to remain, belonging in its discovered position and disposition. Such a descriptive mode is most deserving of the term theory as it is commonly intended, whereas the work of the "hermeneutics of suspicion," or what may be called critique does not have this expository intent. It is not, for example, merely the disclosure of subtle flaws in literary personae.
In contrast to what can truly be called theory, the technique of suspicion is more arresting, and largely directed at the audience. If it is other than psychoanalysis, then it looks at narrative as "the terrible" in a very pure sense almost at face value, as though those who fled from art knew what they were fleeing when in fact in some cases they may not know. And the terrible is in this mode seen as "what does not kill me.” Speaking more broadly, that maxim "what does not kill me makes me stronger," is intended to dissolve illusions of shallow happiness which cloak real underlying interests, desires that a subject had not the will to negotiate. This epigram for all its obscurantism neatly echoes a treatment of morality in which notions like hope and altruism, when they become the norm, lose the beauty that they would have as long as they remained exceptional. They are therefore seen as resentment and presumption.
There are advantages in critique, since it intends to displace not only theories about its object but to change this object or world. Critique does not want to understand and interact with its object, “not to comment on the world but to change it.” In such determination and willful efficacy, practical advantage is selected as the ideal advantage, rather than something hoped for in a knowledge of reality. Thus the disadvantage of critique is obvious. It sacrifices both knowledge and the unexpected advantages of such knowledge.
Expressive implication, however, gives the impression of being a philosophy of motivation and the processes of motive, therefore suggesting a more pragmatic corollary theory of uncertain purpose and justification. For if the poet, as it is said, "directly sees and handles what others dream of," then perhaps life consists of a constant projection of images of motivation and these perhaps express acceptance of reality--but also would appear to have a more mundane and mechanistic power. If expressive implication produces projections of individual life and future, and focuses attention on them, this is like the allure of myth and literature themselves. These projections of sordid life may usually be closest to the tragic, though they may be comical. Even the act of classical Greek composition is taken from the very heart of Greek myth, and the paper on which one writes is set as if on a loom for weaving actual conflict with the gods.
