Kronotoper in Hjalmar Bergman’s authorship

Hjalmar Bergman’s authorship has previously been investigated with Bakhtin’s theories of the novel and the carnival as the main points of reference. This article is instead based on the cen­tral bakhtinian concept of the chronotope. The aim is to show how time and space are related to each other in psychologically and existentially significant ways in a selection of Bergman’s novels. Another aim is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of chronotope as an intru­ment of analysis.Chronotope is a broad concept but limited to specific moments in the diegesis it opens pos­sibilities to study in detail how time thickens and how space is related to time. Furthermore, how chronotopes generate textual derivations on a metaphorical level, can be analysed with the support of Riffaterre’s semiotic theory.The article deals with both major, genre-defining and minor, local chronotopes, but the pri­mary interest is the threshold chronotope, that is, the point where a crisis takes place. In the article there is a focus on key scenes in the chosen novels in order to show how the threshold chronotope constitute a recurrent motif, which in combination with, or contrasted to other chronotopes, forms a characteristic chronotopical pattern in the authorship of Hjalmar Bergman.