The Genre of Trolls - Doria

term’s literary connotations, because it is an established designation for the
prime quality of Little Matt’s character, his unfinalizability. I have argued
that a similar chronotope is to be found in many jocular tales, Johan Alén’s
favourite genre (see Appendices A and B), and that he has super-imposed
it on the wonder tale, amplifying the parodic effect of the subtype through
the incompatibility of that chronotope with the one of the common
subtype of the tale. Hence Johan Alén manipulates chronotopes in two
distinct ways: in “Three Princes” he employs intertextual allusion in order
to add the more situated and disturbing chronotope of the legend to that of
the wonder tale, whereas the epic chronotope of the semi-human is largely
replaced by a novelistic one in “Little Matt” by connecting episodes to the
story not present in the best-known version of the taletype. In other words,
I think those variants of AT 650A which include AT 301B function as
parodies of AT 301, at least in the Swedish-speaking areas in Finland,
where narrators tend to favour variants disposing of the semi-supernatural
hero in some suitably gruesome way. In addition, I believe Alén’s rendition
of the subtype is enriched by its intergeneric relations to jocular tales.
To what genre might “Three Princes” and “Little Matt” be said to belong?
The question is a tricky one, and I will not endeavour to offer a solution
to it; I will merely point to some considerations complicating the matter
further. Parodic texts have been variously construed as constituting a
genre of their own (Hutcheon 1985: 18–19), or as comprising a subgenre of
the jocular tale (Simonsen 1995: 114–115). The most productive point of view
is perhaps furnished by Bakhtin who, while speaking of the parodic sonnets
in Don Quixote, states that a parodic sonnet cannot be classified generically
as a sonnet because the sonnet form does not function as a genre in this
case; it is rather the object of representation, the real hero of the parody. It
is an image of a sonnet, not a proper sonnet (Bakhtin 1986a: 51). Similarly,
the wonder tale as parodied by Johan Alén is not a real wonder tale, but the
image of a wonder tale.
So why did Johan Alén tell such odd variants of the tales? At this point
the metanarrational aspects of parody come to the fore. One possible explanation
has already been hinted at, i.e., the desire to criticize the world
portrayed in the wonder tale and the narrators cherishing it; Alén might
have had ideological objections to the world view reigning in the wonder
tale. Simultaneously, he might have felt that his chosen genre was being
denigrated and overshadowed by the wonder tale in the minds of folklore
Integrating the Perspectives 251