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In this paper we wish to examine the reader's tolerance for contradiction and self-contradiction in fictional discourse in the light of D. W. Winnicott's (1953, 1962, 1963, 1967, 1968, 1971) concepts of tolerance for paradox and mirroring. We shall do so through a reading of the short story “Friendship,” by the Israeli writer S. Y. Agnon (1932), which thematizes as well as dramatizes paradox and mirroring in the specific sense Winnicott accords to the latter concept.
Literary critics point to the pleasure provoked when the incongruous is found in discourses which claim by convention not to represent actual reality. It is this inconsequential character of fiction which allows the reader to suspend his customary standards of truth and falsehood. It is our contention that Winnicott's model of infantile development makes it possible to claim that the reader's acceptance of disjunctive structures in fiction is one of the manifestations of a fundamental psychological ability-which is acquired in the earliest stages of infancy-to remain with the paradox and to experience it as meaningful. (Within the framework of our argument, the distinction between different kinds of multiple reference is irrelevant; for more on these distinctions see Rimmon-Kenan, 1977; Salmon, 1983.) This is not to suggest an epistemological claim for paradox as a category of reality, or as pointing toward a higher, visionary reality (e.g., Fish, 1972, esp. pp. 7-20, 67-70, 75-77), and to validate “alternative modes of thought” (p. 42). The plea we wish to make is that we give more “serious” consideration to the reader's response to fiction and recognize this response as a genuine expression of the homo ludens.
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