The Common Historian: on the Praxis of Reading the Past in Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader

The past as Virginia Woolf presents it in The Common Reader is always a plural scene, inhabited by the present. Monuments like the tower of Caister Castle have jackdaws nesting in their walls, while Sophocles’ Greek city can be fashioned by the mind from the bits and pieces of present-day images. I will argue that in Woolf this translates into a certain conception of how to read texts from the past, inhabiting them rather than contemplating them from afar. Indeed, by mocking the pretensions of philology in her time in its attempt to reach the ideal of knowing Greek, or by highlighting the discrepancy which separates her contemporaries from the Elizabethans, even within the same linguistic sphere, Woolf presents her reader with an extremely modern hermeneutic paradigm. Drawing a parallel with Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, as well as key notions regarding the reading praxis developed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, I would like to shed light on the effect of this paradigm on the reading of history. Refuting the dichotomy between truth and lies in favour of fragmented perspectives, Woolf endows the past with a host of voices, which call upon the present. And through this, she depicts the practice of history as a space of questioning, which always deflects anxieties and hopes back into the past, bringing about new, fruitful readings. Like the jackdaws in the tower, readers live in a world strewn with remnants and remainders, sometimes unrecorded by history. And as such, they have their own claims to that heritage, so that they can and should take up the mantle of the Common Historian, with their own bias and contribute to the common understanding of the past.