The Genre of Trolls - Doria

Lauri Honko has picked up on Riffaterre’s version of intertextuality in
his Textualising the Siri Epic (1998), though he dispenses with many of
Riffaterre’s assumptions, for example the non-referentiality of poetry; being
an ardent defender of the fundamental importance of context and performance
(Honko 1998: 151), Honko has no sympathy for context-free approaches.
What Honko and Riffaterre do share is the emphasis on intertextuality
at the reception of a text. Riffaterre’s exegesis of French poetry is
ostensibly oriented to the reading to be made by the receiver, and Honko
places special theoretical weight on intertextual interpretation when the
singer is internalizing a specific epic on the one hand, and during the performance
of an epic on the other, when the audience is creating coherence
in the text by referring the story to a set of intertexts, which might not be
the same for all participants (Honko 1998: 167, 145, cf. 399).
Other common features are the stress on the individuality of the text,
which Honko seems to feel tends to be downplayed in some accounts of
intertextuality (Honko 1998: 34), and the notion of a shared sociolect
(Riffaterre 1984: 160, n. 2) or pool of tradition (Honko 1998: 69 et passim)
consisting of thematic, poetic, performatory and other traditional models,
elements and rules. The individual performer then selects and adjusts components
of this collective, intertextual store, and it is this application of the
concept that Honko finds most rewarding. The pool of tradition as organized
through a singer’s personal tradition system becomes less disorderly
than the presumed collective one, and it is possible to discern how the material
is retained in the mind, namely as prearranged units and orderings of
plot, but remaining open to editing and novel combinations of elements
(Honko 1998: 70–71, 92–93, 154–155). The concept of the pool of tradition is
intimately connected with another notion: for each separate epic present in
the singer’s mind Honko posits a mental text, a pretextual template incorporating
storylines, textual elements such as episodic patterns, images of
epic situations and multiforms, generic rules and contextual frames, e.g. remembrances
of earlier performances. However, the term should not be
reduced to mean merely fixed wordings stored in the memory and subsequently
used in performance, since that would greatly diminish its explanatory
power. Its force lies in explicating the mechanisms behind the otherwise
rather mysterious composition and performance of extended folklore
forms, like the long oral epic, by providing a distinct but flexible framework
within which to develop the narrative. The totality of mental texts
Intertextuality in the History of Research 29