“Believe you me, I know. I’m pretty sharp when it comes to things like that”: Little My’s Argumentation and Rhetoric

Jukka Mikkonen
Department of History and Philosophy, University of Tampere, Finland
jukka.mikkonen (a) uta.fi

Little My, the small and noisy character of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, is accustomed to getting her own way. Uncooperative and tactlessly candid, she strikes a discordant note in the life of Moominvalley, which Moomintroll attributes to her status as a foster child within the family and which might also be likened to the linguistic situation of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Yet despite her abrasiveness (or possibly because of it), My nearly always succeeds in convincing her interlocutors. It is therefore intriguing to discover what kind of discursive devices she uses in persuading others of her argument.

This essay examines Little My as a debater and analyses her argumentative and rhetorical strategies by employing the so-called classical theory of argumentation and logical fallacies, supplemented with Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of “eristical dialectic” (Eristische Dialektik), or “eristic” (Eristik), the art of disputation and polemics, which was put forward in The Art of Controversy (1864). The essay argues first, that in argumentative situations My is completely indifferent to the basic norms of dialectic, such as aiming towards rationality and logic, and unscrupulously uses logical fallacies in her reasoning, and, second, that she instead persuades people by means of such rhetorical devices as appeals to fear. As a conclusion, it will be suggested that though My’s argumentation is not valid in terms of generally accepted logic, it is nevertheless still extremely effective.