The Genre of Trolls - Doria

creation of aesthetic love. Firstly, it evokes empathy, which is an essential
step preceding the adoption of an outside position; without initial empathy,
outsideness becomes cold and uncaring. Secondly, it elicits sympathy, which
is a crucial ingredient in aesthetic love. Aesthetic love allows us to see the
other as a person, though not necessarily as a self, since it aids finalization.
The balance struck between empathy and outsideness in the relation between
the women is exemplary, at least on the part of the human woman:
she, in her capacity as benefactress, manages to contain her compassion and
maintain her outsideness to the supernatural woman, rather than losing herself
in the suffering of the other. Outsideness, Bakhtin contended, enables
true assistance (Bakhtine 1984: 47). This is of course easier to achieve when
the troll woman is in animal form, but the same balanced relation appears
to obtain later on, when the woman has resumed her humanlike shape.
Regarding consummation, i.e., finalization, the troll woman may be thoroughly
finalized by the human one, but the bestowal of form is probably
mutual; the events in the story are never described from the troll woman’s
point of view, but logically she is just as able to finalize the human actors as
they are to finalize her. In this case, consummation is indeed more of a gift
from the self to the other, on both sides, because it is given with honesty
and love.
Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue is entirely verbal, but if we view acts as dialogical
as well, it might be useful in analyzing the interaction between the
women. The juxtaposition of actions and verbal dialogue may be justified
by citing two of their common denominators, namely outsideness and addressivity.
Addressivity, here utilized interchangeably with responsiveness,
implies that any given utterance is oriented to a response, which it anticipates
and is profoundly influenced by. This answer, the result of an active
understanding in contradistinction to the passive understanding of a word’s
“dictionary significance”, articulates agreement or disagreement with the
utterance, and gives it new dimensions. The speaker’s orientation to a listener
entails inserting the discourse into the alien conceptual horizon of the
receiver in order to obtain an interpretation of the utterance and the speaker’s
own conceptual horizon (Bakhtin 1986a: 280–282; cf. chapter 1.4.1).
Bakhtin thought that the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s works was an extreme
form of outsideness (Emerson 2000: 211); acts, on the other hand,
must, if they are to be responsible, be performed from one’s own, unique
place in existence, i.e., outside the other (Bakhtin 1993: 40–42, 46). Both
264
The Problems of Unfinalizability and Dialogue