Suhail Muhammad Najib

The storytelling scene in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early eighties was rich with amazing texts. Their writers exerted no small effort to satisfy the reader, and they stored a high culture to be able to circumvent the strictness of conservative traditions. Those who follow the Saudi narrative scene in that transitional era find that the Saudi story has taken upon itself the treatment of daily life details, dared to put forward many contemporary social problems, and some contemporary phenomena and traditions, so that the space of narrative expanded to multiple forms of story building, and to its unlimited contents. Some writers resorted to the style of intensification and rotation, and to the technique of suggestive story pulses. Journalistic language, reportage scenes, hidden autobiography pages, and closed symbolic hints and signals became common.

The storytellers of the eighties excelled in diversifying narrative styles, and dramatizing the place by imparting importance to its details and contents. The writer was able to establish the element of time as a basis for organizing the chaos of events, and drawing open endings away from preaching and guardianship, and they contented themselves with semiotic indications to od and evil.

A catery of storytellers went towards (poeticizing) the text and some exaggerated in poetry until their story text turned into a prose poem. Others chose to dramatize the story through elaboration in short dialogues, monitoring the movement of characters, focusing on the visual image adapted from the process of reality and the diversity of plots, and isolating the imagination and preventing it from performing its task.

Mental Image:

Most of the eighties generation renounced the realist doctrine in style and method, and deconstructed the relationship between the self and the subject. Some of them wove texts that combine reality and close imagination, and expand to their dreams and emotions and to the experiences of others. They released the mental image to the furthest extent, drew mythical characters, and roamed in remote areas that their predecessors did not dare to delve into. They talked about coming times and what is in them of joy, fear, strangeness, and wonders. Dr. Nasr Abbas captured the features of the modern Saudi story realistically and described the narrative movement by saying: "And most of the productions of youth among story writers, both men and women, in modern Saudi literature relied on the international technical techniques that crystallized the most important trends of the story in the world today. I am almost certain when I point out that many story writers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are now resorting to a special and distinguished type of contemporary story that we can call (the non-technical story) which abandons all traditional contexts and fixed artistic structures limited by specific boundaries of time and place in the story."

Because the story text in all its forms is a vast space that accommodates many elements that form its aesthetics, and gives the reader space for imagination, questioning, and analysis, some storytellers succeeded in achieving that balance and excelled in bringing the text space closer to the reader's eye and to his imagination, and aroused his astonishment and admiration with contents that had troubled him in the past, and forced him to contemplate and participate in the search for solutions to existing errors.

The Adventure of Experimentation:

The adventure of experimentation in the story that Saudi story writers underwent in the eighties recalculated the production of narrative art in the Kingdom at different levels. While Muhammad Alwan, Ibrahim Al-Nasser, Saad Al-Dosari, Salih Al-Ashqar, Khalil Al-Fazie, Fahd Al-Atiq, Abdu Khal, Yousef Al-Muhaimeed, Abdulaziz Al-Saqabi, Sharifa Al-Shamlan, Ruqayya Al-Shabib, Hiam Al-Mufleh, Qamasha Al-Saif and others from the eighties stage and beyond succeeded, others also failed in reshaping their story text according to modern artistic requirements. Some of them delved into symbolism until their text became difficult to understand, some wrote reflections and emotional thoughts, and some t lost in the depths of experimentation and the mysteries of surrealism. Some excessive poeticism and others exaggerated in brevity, neglecting vital details and obliterating character features until the event weakened and the content emptied and the text structure disintegrated into pieces. This vision is confirmed by Dr. Muhammad Salih al-Shanti in his description of the modern Saudi story, by saying: "If we try to identify the position of short story writers in the Kingdom among their peers in the Arab world, we find that there is more than one bond connecting them to these peers in terms of vision and technique, such as the nightmarish vision of reality, and the embodiment of the sense of frustration, and the poetic tendency..."