In Praise of the Unfiltered View

Edward Hoagland, in the Introduction to a 1993 re-issue of two of his essay collections – The Courage of Turtles and Walking the Dead Diamond River – talks about how he shifted in his late thirties from being a novelist to being an essay-writer. He says,

Now, however, I wrote the thirty-four essays in these two books breezily abruptly in just four years, with a new baby enlivening the house besides, and published many of them in the Village Voice, whose offices were located a few blocks down the street from where I lived. My stuff thus came out immediately, and instead of reaching three or four thousand people, might be placed in the hands of one hundred and fifty thousand. On Staten Island ferry or the Coney Island subway I could see it read, and was plumbing heartfelt material, not filtered through the artifices of fiction.

Not filtered through the artifices of fiction – that is exactly why I prefer factual writing to fiction. It strives to see life plain – no distortion, no embellishment, no fabrication. 

Vladimir Nabokov, among others, would disagree. In his view, “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, 1980). But seeing the world this way misses so much! It misses the beauty and strangeness of what actually happens. In support of the unfiltered view, I quote Philip Larkin: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” Required Writing, 1983).