Negative capability of a writer, so celebrated by romantic poets like keats doesnt actually mean that the author doesnt hav an opinion. or for that matter, dialogism and polyphony in modern novel, conceptualized by the Russian critic Bakhtin do not imply that the author is unopinionated and voiceless in a text...
What can be a stronger stand than choosing to author a text? The writer's urge to write something is itself a very strong opinion...
Take Herbert by Nabarun Bhattacharya. Herbert, the eponymous protagonist is a semi-retarded simpleton who claims to communicate with the dead and is eventually hounded out by the Rationalists Association. After he commits suicide, when his body is about to be cremated, an explosion takes place... he was being cremated alongwith his old bed and it comes out that there were dangerous explosives beneath his bedding, which were kept there long ago by a Naxal relative of Herbert. A stronger critique of enlightenment and bourgeios reason hasn't ever been written in Bengali language... In any oppressive society, traditional wisdom is the justification of oppression... and how easily the fool becomes an inadvertent rebel, and how tragic is his rebellion...
The author has a crusade to fight... well, all writers worth their salt do that... they resist hegemony. The basic idea of creative writing is to defamiliarize... ever wondered why all craftless writers appear monotonous? because they align with hegemony and in that process surrender the basic literariness of a text....
so yes, the witer didn't die, no matter what Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and their Indian counterparts said...and the author still has a voice in his text...its just that now she lets the reader think, and doesn't do the ex-gratia thinking on behalf of the reader...
