ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Virginia Woolf's search for a "common voice" and her vision of the literary creator as the articulator of this collective voice. The "common voice" that Woolf gives to the London community is a choral but interrupted linguistic expression that does not work according to referential and conventional meaning, like the woman beggar's song in Mrs Dalloway and the children's song in The Years. Certainly, for Woolf, the relation between the storyteller and the community in the Middle Ages was characterised by a closeness and an organicism absent in modern times. Critics have tended to indifferently employ the terms "novelist," "writer" or "storyteller," in order to refer to Bernard. The consolidation of reading as the main literary practice, then, went together with the end of a communal world characterised by an organic bond between literary creator and community. In the post-mythic age, however, the community and its linguistic expression are necessarily dispersed and fragmented.
