The Genre of Trolls - Doria

y employing it for black magic reasserts her negative unfinalizability, as it
emphasizes the unexpectedness of her actions.
If we turn to the boy’s relation to the troll, we may note the initial, dialogical
position he assumes in his interaction with her. For him, the troll
girl is a Thou; he addresses her as another, alien self, and he respects her
independence, inner freedom and unfinalizability (cf. Bachtin 1991: 71).
Despite the fact that he can perceive her physical form, and thus would be
able to finalize her spatially and temporally, he seems to refrain from it,
allowing her to reveal herself in dialogue; or that is what the narrator implies,
since they chatted among themselves, speaking of one thing or another—these
dialogues are not represented in the text.
Bakhtin’s conception of dialogue has been compared to Martin Buber’s,
for natural reasons. It has been argued that the main characteristic distinguishing
the former from the latter is that Bakhtin did not adopt the vertical,
metaphysical form of dialogue so distinct for Buber, nor did he posit
an eternal or absolute Thou. Caryl Emerson suggests that Bakhtin always
preferred to approach an ethical problem from an everyday perspective,
since abstract formulations tend to engender passivity (Emerson 2000: 232–
233). Dialogue must be situated, take place between people, and there are
no guarantees that it will be successful or even wholesome. Dialogue is
unstable, subject to the vicissitudes of interpersonal relations, and it is a
task to keep it going. The difficulties of dialogue should not be underestimated
(Emerson 2000: 149), as we will see in the following.
To what extent his dialogical orientation to the troll girl changes when
he realizes she wishes to marry him, and when she starts paying him unwanted
visits in his home, is hard to tell. The text does not give us much to
go on, all we can do is speculate. It is possible that he is no longer as
willing to listen unconditionally as he was before; if so, their dialogical
relation deteriorates, slowly being degraded to monologue. When he betrays
her, their dialogic interaction is at an end. Now another deception
becomes evident: the girl is actually an old woman, and she has been duping
the boy all along. What happens to dialogue after this exposure? Not
much, really. In his analyses of Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin did not deny
the existence of dialogue even if one of the participants was less than truthful
at times; dialogue is an attitude, an act of active understanding, not a
relation requiring absolute honesty, though it certainly helps if some degree
of truthfulness is involved. The boy has this attitude in the beginning, and
The Terrors of Unfinalizability 261