The Genre of Trolls - Doria

perceiving another person as an other was, according to Bakhtin, the ability
to create a bounded image of that person, and in this case, it is impossible
to do so, due to the invisibility of the troll. The troll is therefore transferred
to the category of the self which is characterized by just such a lack
of, and the impossibility of the existence of, a bounded image. The parents’
position of outsideness loses its significance completely, as it utterly fails to
endow the troll with a body and soul, and hence to finalize it. To them,
the troll is not contained within her exterior form, and her interior does
not coincide with that form. If the boy had not been able to hint at her
whereabouts, she might as well have been engulfing and embracing the
world, like the self, but in a physically more concrete sense; in other words,
she could be anywhere and everywhere. Thus, she is not an object for the
parents, nor does she possess any significant boundary that could pin-point
her in any respect; put in relation to Bakhtin’s distinctions, this would place
her in the category of the self. Her temporal whole, circumscribed by her
birth and death, is entirely inaccessible to them; for all they know, she
might be the one encompassing their lives, i.e., they are objects for her,
creatures finalized by the supernatural, but they cannot reciprocate by making
her embodied, contained within her boundaries. This is one of the reasons
for their anxiety and the desperation with which they strive to make
her visible. The infliction of pain propels her to abandon her invisibility
and assume a tangible shape. In Scandinavian folklore it is a standard trick
for coping with the nightmare and witches appearing in animal guise or as
artefacts: the pain recalls them to their true shape due to the analogic relation
between the physical and spiritual bodies; harming one body has repercussions
for all the other ones (Raudvere 1993: 48). The adoption of a
physical body enables the normal operation of outsideness; the parents finally
succeed in giving the troll material boundaries. The assignation of her
temporal boundaries is interesting: her advanced age places her closer to
the end of her life, which facilitates finalization. The life-span of the troll
becomes possible to grasp for humans when her death is foreseeable.
A consequence of Bakhtin’s conception of self and other is that the self
always constructs its identity in relation to others (cf. Holquist 1990: 28–29).
Here it might be appropriate to consider what the other offers the self in
this respect. I have already touched upon the one-sided finalization of the
boy’s parents available to the troll. This kind of finalization is not a gift
from the other to the self, because it lacks a crucial ingredient: love. For
The Terrors of Unfinalizability 259