As the titular description of the work? I suppose because I set out to write the literary equivalent of “a polyphonic musical composition in which a theme or themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and developed contrapuntally in a continuous interweaving of the parts” (as the definition that prefaces the book would have it). “Fugue” in that respect reflects the underlying concept that animates and orders Ghost Writ, the dialectic. I guess I could’ve called the book “a dialectical inquiry” or something to that effect, but that seems both too pedantic and inaccurate. The third definition of fugue also figures into my thinking, humorously and ironically — Ghost Writ embodies a kind of “disturbed state of consciousness” that expresses the primary paradox summed up by one of the books epigrams: “I aspired to authenticity, but I never got beyond verisimilitude.” Finally, the prefacing definition of fugue mirrors the syllogistic, and at times pseudo-syllogistic, structure of the work itself (reflected at the start of every chapter by the use of three framing quotations, the last of which is always from Gilmartin Jacobsen). |