The Genre of Trolls - Doria

that he has subverted the ethical foundations of the world. The world must
move to accomodate him if he is to flourish in it, and it indubitably seems
he does.
6.4 Novelization
Moreover, the image of Little Matt is novelized by his process of becoming.
For Bakhtin the hero of the Bildungsroman is in some respects one of the
epitomes of the novelistic hero who is characterized by a discrepancy between
surface and self. Any representation of him will be forever incomplete,
as the fullness of his humanity is impossible to comprehend in a single
form (Bakhtin 1986a: 37). In contrast to his counterparts, Little Matt
has attained this non-coincidence with his exterior and achieved the status
of an individual. The other strong men are almost epic personages, already
completed and unchanging. Their fates and positions are predetermined
and wholly commensurate with their persons. Nothing remains unrealized,
since their interior and exterior, appearance and actions are on the same
level. Yet there is no indication that their opinion of themselves is congruent
with others’ conception of them—as is the case in the epic, according
to Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1986a: 34)—since that would imply they perceived
themselves as monsters.
Hence Little Matt may be described as a novelistic character, like many
human heroes of the wonder tale and other folklore genres. One of the
roots of the novelistic chronotope(s), and thereby the novelistic hero(es),
lies in folklore, as Bakhtin points out (Bakhtin 1986a: 206–224), and I am
here transposing the concept of novelization to the sphere of folklore. I am
not arguing that Johan Alén was influenced by novels—there is no evidence
for that—but I am suggesting that he shared the novel’s preoccupation
with the image of man; many of his stories are games of identity,
masks and subterfuge, operating with an ideology of non-coincidence of
interior and exterior (see Appendix B for examples).
The novel also represents indeterminacy, openendedness, contact with
the present and, on a more immediately observable level, dialogization,
laughter, irony, humour and self-parody. Novelization means that other
genres are drawn into this matrix and undergo a transformation (Bakhtin
1986a: 7). Bakhtin maintains that novelization does not entail an imposition
of an alien generic canon on already completed genres, since the novel
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Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén