The Genre of Trolls - Doria

its chosen form exacerbates its unfinalizability. The uncertainty concerning
the intentions and possible actions of the white bear also induces the human
characters to try to chase it away, and to remove the unfinalizable element
from their everyday world, but the bear returns to claim the girl and
kidnap her.
From this point onward, the erratic behaviour of supranormal creatures
dominates the story: the bear abducts the girl, but does not bring her to its
habitation; it merely abandons her on a hill. The supernatural girl occupied
with spinning on a spinning wheel of gold points the human one in the
wrong direction for no obvious reason, and the man living in the house of
iron, a rather demonic setting, is supposed to show her the way home, but
suddenly starts dancing her to death. The randomness and horrifying consequences
of unfinalizability on the level of the individual are increasingly
emphasized as the narrative progresses, and the dangers of the pronounced
selfhood of supranormal beings become wholly apparent. There is very little
to fix them in space, time and meaning, to make their interior and exterior
coincide, to make them an object for human cognition. They continually
transcend the categories intended to circumscribe them, and escape
almost every type of finalization: they are always spilling over the brim, as
Bakhtin put it. This means that they are also denied the blessings of finalization,
the conferral of form as a gift. We may perhaps surmise that they
effect a finalization of the human characters, since the plot implies it; the
supernatural creatures can manipulate the human girl, for example, precisely
as they wish, which indicates that she conforms to the image they
have of her, and hence to their consummation of her.
Moreover, there is no dialogical relation between man and troll in this
text. It is implicit that they talk to each other, but not in order to listen to
and understand one another. The purpose of speech is purely instrumental,
pertaining to the question “How do I find my way home?”. When the information
required has been received, further discussion becomes unnecessary.
Rather, a dialogical position is assumed by the narrator only vis-à-vis
the supranormal beings, and on this level unfinalizability comes to full fruition.
The story is quite exceptional in its profuse celebration of negative
unfinalizability; like Dostoevsky in Bakhtin’s reading, the narrator seems to
provoke the supernatural creatures to surprise him or her, to allow them to
struggle against any definition of their essence imposed from outside. He
permits them to reveal themselves in their acts, since verbal dialogue is not
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The Problems of Unfinalizability and Dialogue