Revealing the �Real Mechanism of Thought� ?

The Third Annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) convened November 1, with hundreds of writers and would-be writers participating. The objective--to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, regardless of quality. This sort of project has some philosophical roots in the study of "automatic writing". Ed LaFarge of the Village Voice reviews the history of automatic writing and the fascination it held for writers in the 19th century and in the surrealist movement of the 1920s. One proponent, Andre Breton, posited that autmatic writing "revealed the real mechanism of thought" and that if all writers embraced the habit, "all distinctions, as between perception and representation, subject and object, waking and sleep, sanity and madness, would collapse, and the subject would be freed from what the bourgeoisie, for their own nefarious ends, called 'reality.'�
NaNoWriMo !
Village Voice writer Ed LaFarge