The individual, even the concept of the individual, the notion that individuals even exist, has been under fresh attack for at least the past 20 years. Psychologists worshipping at the shrines of Lacan and Derrida, and deconstructionists attempting to argue that literature is simply an expression of ideology, dispute the existence of authors as well. Shakespeare is not really Shakespeare. He is a collection of social forces. The old wrangle over whether Shakespeare's plays were not in fact written by Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth is thus resolved with delicious perversity: no one wrote Shakespeare's plays at all. Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth could not have written them because they too did not exist. In fact Shakespeare's plays are not plays. They are texts, or artifacts, or discourses— social impulses mysteriously articulated through ghostly human figures that merely called themselves Shakespeare or Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth. Sitting at shaky, candlelit desks, these shivering apparitions allowed the ideologies of their day, and occasional critiques of them, to distill their ghostly powers through their nonexistent shimmering bones.

Genius too is denied. All men and women are presumed to be equal, not only before the law but in all possible abilities, with the differences that clearly arise among them described as purely social in origin. To maintain this bizarre idea, a great many facts are conveniently ignored. When it is claimed, for instance, that both Darwin and Wallace discovered evolution, it is forgotten or ignored that only Darwin offered the proof of evolution and laid bare its actual process— a scientifically crucial point. When it is urged that had not Newton discovered the law of gravity and the presence of colors in beams of light, someone else would have done so, it is blithely ignored that no one but Newton did so, and this after millions of years of human development. Einstein's and Max Planck's discoveries of the relations of mass to energy and of quantum mechanics are ignored as unique contributions to human knowledge, with no evidence to show that without these two scientists others would have made the same discoveries. But could anyone but Joseph Conrad have written Joseph Conrad's novels? Could anyone but Langston Hughes have written Langston Hughes's poetry? Could anyone but Sylvia Plath have written Sylvia Plath's poems? Do we not all have different fingerprints? Or voiceprints? Or genetic “fingerprints”?