The Genre of Trolls - Doria

narratives are parodies of the genre of the wondertale, and that this entails
some fundamental changes to their structure, e.g. to the chronotope of the
stories. Mikhail Bakhtin regarded the chronotope, “the intrinsic connectedness
of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in
literature”, as a formally constitutive category of literature with a profound
impact on genre and generic distinctions, and on the image of man
(Bakhtin 1986a: 84–85). In narratives of trolls, the image of the supernatural
is subject to a certain number of restrictions; for example, trolls
should not marry humans and live happily ever after, nor should they be
allowed to live permanently in the human world. A change in these chronotopes
constituting the image of the troll may influence genre. One form
of change of the chronotope is novelization, a term coined by Bakhtin to
denote the transference of “novelistic” features, such as indeterminacy,
openendedness and contact with the present, to other genres where they
are usually absent (Bakhtin 1986a: 7). I believe these features are also to be
found in folklore, particularly in jocular tales, a genre which was the speciality
of this performer (for a selection of his narratives, see Appendix B).
Novelization might illuminate the process of the reconfiguration of genres
spoken of by Briggs and Bauman. One aspect of the novel stressed by
Bakhtin in his book on Dostoevsky is the introduction of the unfinalizable
hero into the novel. Unfinalizability refers to the indeterminacy and openendedness
of a character, to a character who is evolving, outgrowing his
former bounds. In the case of Johan Alén’s tales, this indeterminacy is a
positive value.
On the third level, discussed in chapter 7, the relationship between man
and troll is scrutinized with the aid of two of Bakhtin’s favourite concepts,
unfinalizability and dialogue. This constitutes a reconsideration of Bakhtin’s
notion of unfinalizability in the context of narratives of the supernatural,
viewed as a genre. Hence I am broadening the scope of the inquiry into
generic concerns by reviewing the texts included in my material in the light
of the concept of unfinalizability, which I think might be useful in explicating
the construction of texts depicting encounters with the supernatural.
Stories of such encounters appear to rely on the indeterminacy and unfinalizability
of the supranormal beings for suspense and for the efficacy of the
narrative; from the perspective of the characters, though, unfinalizability is
not necessarily an unequivocal blessing. Therefore, there is a conflict between
the demands of the story/genre and those of the characters, and it is
Statement of Purpose 5