Very misc. touching on Pynchon and counterforces

[Mark Kohut]

I have read a book called With Respect to Readers, Cornell U Press 1970, by one Walter Slatoff because
it got into my head once that I would respect and learn from it and I did, I hope. Slatoff seemed to also
teach at Cornell, I think, quoting other Cornell guys like Ammons and McConkey (as well as Pynchon)
after some time spent surviving as a freelance 'critic'.........
 
He quotes the paragraph in which Benny finds he has 'finagled himself' into being in love with Rachel. It concerns 
authorial awareness and the narrator's. 
 
But to get to the subject point, he uses the concept counterforce, lower case, to describe a vision of reading and teaching it
that pushes against too much distance or too much identification. Which should be interpenetration of literature and life to experience 
it---perhaps both--properly. Examples at the extremes: accepting a metaphor of a bomb exploding in a crowd as like a
flower blooming---seems Mussolini did as well as countless unfelt academic exercises about powerful books; and/or many who are moved to living out the truth of some fiction they love.
("It changed my life"---and many do, on their perceived 'fictional' imperatives---"You talking to ME, Walt??)  
 
Anyway, counterforce seems to be an extension by anaolgy of another verbal aspect of many great works he likes (and thinks
account for the shifting of many 'new' readings  of our richest authors as more latent thematic strands are raised in importance
by the critic/reader) which is the pull in a different direction of the overtness in texts......examples: How Milton verbally 'loved'
the embodiment of evil, Satan [my example] or the lyrically energetic verse about "The Hollow Men" of Eliot [his example] with
some fine stuff on a plist fave: 'unreliable' narrators in various degrees OR better, how to sort the dancer from the dance---the author's
vision from his narrator's. How Paul is 'undercut' in Sons & Lovers and how, speak up Alice, James' narrator in The Sacred Fount is
so....epistemologically dicey that we might not be able to even 'get' the novel. [Now i want to read it]. 
 
Seems the notion, most famously in counterculture, was pervasive back In the Day. 
 
P.S. seem also that exploring the writer's "voice" was a relatively new critical way to go then.....[he footnotes a couple seminal articles]
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