The Genre of Trolls - Doria

stressed in his early works (Bakhtin 1993: 40 et passim). This implies that he
can relate to others while maintaining his sense of being a self, an openended,
unfinalizable entity, and that he engages in earnest dialogue with
them. Those themes, unfinalizability and dialogue, are the topic of the
next chapter.
6.5 Integrating the Perspectives
If we return to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter—what
happens to genre in Johan Alén’s treatment of the two wonder tales—we
can note that he transforms several features of the stories. Charles Briggs
and Richard Bauman’s conception of intertextual gaps has been of assistance
in scrutinizing Alén’s manipulation of the texts in relation to a generic
model, while theories of parody have elucidated the double nature of his
narratives. The conclusion to be drawn from the combination of these two
perspectives is that the double-voicedness of parodic texts can be correlated
to the minimization and maximization of intertextual gaps in such a way
that, apart from the results presented thus far, the latter may be said to operate
on two further levels, namely on the level of the parodied language
which minimizes the distance between text and generic model, and on that
of the parodying language which rather maximizes that distance. Here
minimization and maximization are at work simultaneously, and the superimposition
and interplay of them both contributes to the parodic effect by
highlighting the discrepancy between the two languages.
In the case of “Three Princes” the references to various intertexts in the
parodying language or text introduce a new form of maximization into the
aforesaid language, as they insert the alien chronotope of the legend into
the text. This chronotope and the intertexts associated with it are potential
rather than real; they are always on the verge of breaking into the text and
becoming manifest, but they never actually do. As for the story of “Little
Matt”, a maximization of intertextual gaps is achieved through the adoption
of a subtype-specific chronotope linked to the image of man, or halfman
to be correct. This is a more local and personal chronotope, but it has
far-reaching consequences for the story in its entirety. The change in Little
Matt’s individual chronotope in relation to the conventional one in the
Swedish-language variants of this taletype affects the world depicted in the
text. I have labelled the chronotope of Little Matt novelistic, despite the
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Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén