"We" Voice In Short Fiction

In one of her interviews, Jhumpa Lahiri, commented on the process of her writing of the story Treatment of Bibi Halder. She said, it had been an attempt on her part to experiment with the "we" voice. I think, in lots of ways, the "we" voice works well for stories set in India, Bengal or for that matter, anywhere else in the Third World. I am not trying to generalize the "Third World" as essentially "collective" and the "First World" as primarily "individual", but I am beginning to think there is a difference in the way the very genre of the short story has developed in a lot of the Third World context and US. I am not sure to what extent, what Barbara Jane Reyes and her other friends call it, the MFA Industrial Complex, that has contributed to it. But, there is definitely a way in which the workshops teach students to read and write short stories. The emphasis is always on one individual, the so-called "change" at the end, the "conflict" etc. Not that these are not essential elements in good story-telling, but there are plenty of short stories in the world which do not necessarily depend on one individual's conflict resolution model. For me, right now, as I am working through this story (A Phuchka for Bindudi), I am also thinking, doesn't the "we" narrative dis-spell this model a little bit?

Because the "we" voice is really trying to narrate an event, a biography through the collective voice of a specific community. And it is doing so precisely because an event or a person stands out. That is, it challenges or at least complicates the communal standards in some way or the other. So, it is almost like through this story, the community is trying to re-assess its own norms. At least, when a writer adopts that "we" voice, that's how I would see what he/she is trying to achieve rhetorically. For me, then, there is almost a kind of dialectical relationship between the individual and the community within this "we" voice in a way that is not always the dominant trend within contemporary American short fiction. So, to get back to Jhumpa Lahiri, she also said in that interview that the "we" voice is inconsequential in a sense. This is what I have been thinking about a lot while revising this story. One of my workshop-colleagues asked an interesting question: who is the protagonist of your story? Bindu Didimoni or this collective "we" voice? My tentative answer is, both. But then, does it really matter if we do not have one clearly identifiable protagonist in a short story? And as I am thinking through this process, I would like to say, unlike Jhumpa Lahiri, I don't want the "we" voice to be inconsequential. If "change" is one of the things that constitutes essence of a short-fiction narrative, or any narrative, I want both Bindu Didimoni and this "we" voice to experience/perceive this change.

Now, the challenge is, how to achieve all of these within the formal elements of a short story. So, without devoting much more time to yapping, it's time for me to turant go back to that.