L'Odissea di Stefano D'Arrigo. Percorsi di lettura del modello omerico

The article will present a historical-critical pathway through some works of the Sicilian writer Stefano D’Arrigo highlighting the relevance of the models of ancient Greek literature, the Odyssey in particular – and the lyricist and tragic theatre of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides – to his creation of his controversial novel Horcynus Orca, which was published in 1975 by the Mondadori publishing house after some twenty years of creative work. Starting from the thematic nucleus of nòstos, it is the works of Hölderlin’s poetry which D’Arrigo wrote his thesis on, that consider the origin of the myth of ancient Greece as a projection into the past of nostalgia which characterises the memory of the homeland. Subsequently, the outbreak of the war highlights the trauma and feeling of mourning that the author probably finds in the classics of ancient drama with which he confronts himself in the Fifties, when the project of writing the novel takes shape in which the sailor ‘Ndrja Cambrìa from Naples returns, after the 1943 armistice, to his village of origin in Sicily. Likewise in the fifties, the influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey, works he assiduously referred to in his adolescence, can be found in the writer’s verses, published in the Codice siciliano collection (Scheiwiller, 1957), and nourish the imagination in the perspective of the written invention of a modern Ulyssean epos. This is also developed in relation to the model of Eliot’s poetics in The Waste Land and in the horizon of the “mythical method” which he discusses in connection with Joyce’s Ulysses. In the final phase of writing Horcynus, the work of the Dublin author constitutes an undoubtedly decisive reference point for D’Arrigo, who undertakes to structure the order of the ancient Homeric myth (the nòstos) in the story together with the chaos of contemporary history (war).