The Genre of Trolls - Doria

lacks a canon, but a liberation from ossified forms impeding their development
in a new historical context (Bakhtin 1986a: 39). Gary Saul Morson
and Caryl Emerson have, not without cause, labelled Bakhtin’s approach in
“Epic and Novel” a version of novelistic imperialism (Morson & Emerson
1990: 301), and I concur that some of his statements are somewhat exaggerated,
but I still consider the notion of novelization a useful one, for it
delineates the process of applying a specific point of view on man and the
world, which is most palpable in the novel, to contexts where it is usually
absent. Moreover, though I will not at present explore this aspect further,
novelization is related to other, more extensive social changes which boost
it into primacy within the field of literature in a given period (Bakhtin
1986a: 7). Novelization is more a consequence than a cause.
I believe Alén is implementing a novelization of the image of Little Matt
by boosting the subtype-specific chronotope with that of his favourite genre,
the jocular tale, which, very much like the novel, is concerned with the
inconclusive present and its social diversity. I have already outlined the
essential traits of this process in the analysis of chronotopicity above, as the
markers of both coincide. In addition, novelization and the chronotope of
becoming engender a profound unfinalizability of the figure of Little Matt.
Being a term with many meanings, unfinalizability may designate innovation,
surprisingness, the genuinely new, openness, potentiality, freedom
and creativity (Morson & Emerson 1990: 36–37). It is the precondition of
creativity, ethical responsibility and historicity, as it is achieved in everyday
processes saturated with the requirements of an ethical point of view on
what is going on, and with the presentness and potentialities of each historical
moment. Time is open, and at every moment any one of numerous
possibilities may be realized. The present does not invariably follow from
the past, and it is not wholly constrained by the past (Morson & Emerson
1990: 38–49). Unexpected things still happen, like Little Matt’s becoming,
and they occur in the context of everyday events, as in the social situations
in and through which Little Matt grows as a person.
In the character of Little Matt, Johan Alén shows the potentials of true
freedom, which is neither random nor imaginary (Morson & Emerson
1990: 39–42), but imbued with a keen awareness of the nature of time and
the world, and the individual’s place in it. Little Matt is assuming responsibility
for his own place in existence, and is thus also created as an ethical
being. He knows that there is “no alibi for being”, as Bakhtin frequently
Novelization 249