D’Arrigo, Gertrude Stein e i nomi della rosa

Stefano D’Arrigo has always rejected the label of “experimenter”, preferring the title of “innovator” to assert a literary commitment that is not merely a self-referential game with the expressive tools, but rather a creative quest that must measure itself across the board against the enigmatic reality of our turbulent and contradictory age. During the years in which he was planning Horcynus Orca, D’Arrigo took Gertrude Stein’s narrative writing as a reference point for a new realism suited to a reality, such as that of war, which appears increasingly strange, unreal and elusive. It is precisely this need to find a form of realism capable of depicting a confused and indecipherable reality that leads D’Arrigo to invent a new, extraordinarily fluid language related to the primordial processes of verbal signification. This invention of a “new idiom” turns the novel into a “journey of knowledge” through the shadows and debris of an unknown catastrophe.