TRADITIONS AND NEW TRENDS OF SAUDI STORYTELLING AT THE PRESENT STAGE

Abstract

This article examines the novelistic genre in Saudi literature, which has undergone significant changes during the last decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and is called by Saudi literary critics "the stage of experimental writing", or the stage of "modernization". The change that the very concept of realistic narrative has undergone, the previous attitudes have acquired a new content from modern Saudi writers. The concept of the external world was no longer limited in their work to an artistic study of immediate reality, but covered memories, reflections and psychological experiences of a person, a picture of deep loneliness of representatives of the creative intelligentsia is depicted, and the orders of the social system are criticized, in which a creative personality is not able to create a new one, but can only express its growing state of deep and tragic alienation, on the against the background of the general desire for accumulation, the emergence of crisis phenomena in the spiritual sphere, expressed in the alienation of an enlightened person from society, and the formation of a generation incapable of empathy and compassion for other people. Most of the writers of the "modernization" stage began to avoid the former verbosity and lengthiness in the text of the stories, striving for emotional saturation and the capacity of the narrative. The writers consciously modified the narrative form, using artistic techniques that violate the chronological order, fusing the past with the present, introduced scenic elements and fragmentarity, using flashback techniques, skillfully combining the "scenes of life" built in the form of movie frames into one small realistic canvas. The hero of their stories is the image of a "little man", indifferent, who live with petty worries, without inner content and human dignity. It is not the social system that makes them "small", but the narrowness of the spiritual world.