As the titular description of the work? - 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, and the third definition of fugue tempers my seriousness.
- 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.” 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).
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