The Genre of Trolls - Doria

presuppose responsiveness in order to exist at all: without addressivity, one
would not be moved to act, or to engage in dialogue. Outsideness and addressivity
are closely interrelated in so far as the latter requires an outside
position to the person or voice to be responded to, and the former presumes
responsiveness to be meaningful.
Dialogue, as Caryl Emerson notes (Emerson 2000: 230), further assumes
trust: trust not to be betrayed or abused, confidence enough to hazard participation
in genuine dialogue. These women have that trust from the start,
despite the slightly inauspicious nature of their first meeting (see chapter
3.3). The human woman turns to the other, even in her animal shape, and
responds to her needs. The latter reciprocates by letting her husband ask
her benefactress to be the godmother of the child she is carrying, indicating
complete confidence in the reliability of the human woman. In this text,
godmotherhood also entails assistance at the delivery, another gesture of
trust on the troll woman’s part, and of responsiveness and pity on the human
woman’s. The answer to this benevolent deed is ministered by the
male troll by paying the midwife for her services with the seemingly worthless
chips of wood, later transformed into a fortune. This sequence of acts
could be construed as dialogic not simply because it is an exchange, but
again, due to the attitude to the other evinced in it; a dialogical attitude, as
mentioned above, is primarily characterized by the ability to listen and the
will to understand—addressivity, in other words—a trait evidently present
in the relation between the women. Even though dialogue may be more
conducive to positive unfinalizability, positive consummation might not be
wholly alien to it.
The relationship between the human couple and the male troll is more
strained. He represents negative unfinalizability, focused on the interior
aspect. His physical form is never described, but it does not appear to be a
problem. The real bother is that his interior is spirit rather than soul: according
to Bakhtin, the soul is the spirit of the other viewed from outside
(Bakhtine 1984: 111), finalized, but the operation of this phase of consummation
seems to be flawed. Therefore, the exterior and interior of the troll
fail to coincide, and the humans are left with a sense of unease. As in the
previous text, the potential unexpected actions of the unfinalized supernatural
is the main cause of alarm. Outsideness becomes precarious, incapable
as it is to fill its function completely; it fails to create that finalized image
of the other, and thus, to some extent, to predict his actions.
The Terrors of Unfinalizability 265