With Trollope's example in mind, then, Eugenides's and Hitchens's suggestion to ignore fashion, commerce, etc., starts to look less like tough-minded, clear-eyed individualism, and more like a ritual genuflection in the direction of fashion and commerce. Advocating contrarian individualism is actually an exercise in vacuous platitude—and just bad advice.

Certainly Eugenides's article does nothing to dispel the sense of the deep conventionality of that advice. After insisting that the young writers stay true each to their own uniqueness, Eugenides imagines for them a series of unique experiences sodden with the stale genre tropes of literary fiction. He tells them they started writing in "response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive," and then imagines them all standing by a river with a dog appreciating nature, and/or at college experiencing romantic angst. "That's what you were probably like. I know you guys. We recognize each other," he declares. And then, with no apparent sense of irony: "So what I'm saying is, this is what got you here tonight: your over-stimulated, complicated, by turns ecstatic and despondent, specific self." All the brilliant young writers have the same specific ecstatic, despondent self, it turns out—an ecstatic, despondent self that looks just like Jeffrey Eugenides.

Not that Eugenides's self originates with him or anything. His vision of the artist as imbued with a transcendent and yet desperately vulnerable idiosyncratic something—he didn't make that up. Instead, those ideas come from that world outside that he's so worried about. They derive from vaunting modernist artistic self-assertion a la abstract expressionism; or from vaunting romantic artistic self-assertion a la Byron; or, going way back, from the vaunting philosophic self-assertion of Descartes trying to figure out a way to exist in sealed skull with no world anywhere. "I think therefore I am" is less a statement of the way things are than it is an Enlightenment utopian fantasy, in which the ego gets to be the entire universe.

Outside of solipsistic day-dreams, of course, the world is pretty stubborn about not dissolving into your ego. It is full, as Eugenides says, with "intellectual and artistic viruses that...will be eager to colonize your system." But surely the fact that there are things out there that aren't the writer is not a threat, but a necessity. Language, after all, isn't a spontaneous effusion of the self like vomit or urine. Language is social; it's a form of communication. Descartes can insist, "Cogito, ergo sum," but before that "Cogito," there was some other person who taught little Descartes his Latin. Rather than "I think therefore I am," it would be more accurate to say, "Somebody else speaks, therefore I am," or, better, "Somebody else spoke first, therefore I can speak as well."