The Short Novel: Between Abbreviation and Genre (Haitham Bahnam Bardi's Selected Novels)

Short novels are prose genres that represent an experimental field that rebels against the traditional classical form of the novel with its format, which is generated from the mythological and epic narrative. The epic nature of the short novel lies in its ability to present a discourse that relies on the eloquence of meaning by investing in techniques that make it a genre that attracts minds and activates reception and makes it tend to address reality with artistic means, new foci and angles, and in a way that constitutes a new vision of reality according to the term (world vision). Through the technique of reduction and the characteristic of the deletion and the isolation of the system associated with detailed prolixity, the formal architectural structure and the content are similar, and the theme is linked to the performance, and the aesthetic form according to this technique becomes one of the dominant factors in the overall formation of the literary work and its components, which are the techniques and production skills that Haitham Bahnam Barada relied on in creating his short novels. However, the advantage of these novels and the modeling of their work is that they not only possess the characteristics of difference and heterogeneity but have merged with the tendency of experimentation as a dominant, significant, and present factor within artistic and intellectual work. Our critical approach, which is based on the artistic method that relies on the mechanism of analyzing texts to extract the stylistic features of the short novel and its genre, is nothing but an addition to the attempts to reveal the world and codes of these novels that are characterized by a rich content in addition to the aesthetic investment of the techniques of the artistic form (brevity). Through an intellectual examination, it can be realized that the novelist Haitham Bahnam Bardi did not resort to the short narrative tendency as a luxury, but rather this trend reveals and proves the awareness of his choice and the intentionality of the creative act and of the borrowing of the formal architectural engineering structure to express the solid contents, and the short novel becomes for him a system in which connotations, occupations and the diversity of techniques are crowded, arriving at a narrative linguistic text characterized by abbreviation, freshness of rhythm and interrelation with the visions that reveal the crisis of man and his struggle with himself, with others and with the universe.