Inventio in improvised bertsolaritza

3.3 Invention in improvised bertsolaritza

Invention is the search for and/or creation of suitable arguments.

By “argument” it should be taken to understood all the content and reference that the bertsolari can use for the achievement of the desired end (arouse emotions in the audience, score points off the opponent, reinforce one’s own, and so on).

“Suitable”, in turn, is, like everything in rhetoric, a value relative to the audience in each case. Given a specific audience, suitable is that argument which that audience accepts as such. Which does not mean that the improviser has to always renounce his point of view, but only that he has to take into account the initial position of the listeners before starting to sing. In bertsolaritza involving homogenous co-text it is rare that any conflict arises, as the bertsolari and audience share points of view to a great extent. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the tension between what the bertsolari really thinks and what (s)he intuitively believes has to be sung in order to “get to” the listeners, is one of the central problems:

As a bertsolari, you try to influence the audience before you by whatever means, by hook or by crook. The tension between what you have to offer and the capacity of the audience to receive it is the essence of a bertso and, at the same time, the management of which is the most difficult task of bertsolaritza… If you are too much into your own thing, you do not communicate; if you bend too much to your listeners, you cannot contribute anything of interest.(62)

As with any other genre, improvised bertsolaritza sets its own framework of references. So, for example, arguments which in real life or in another genre might be far-fetched and unacceptable can be perfectly suitable for improvised bertsolaritza. We have defined this oral art form as a genre of epideictic rhetoric, which means that the artistic dimension in bertsolaritza is more relevant than, say, in ecclesiastic, parliamentary or judicial oratory. In other words, even in performances without a theme-prompter, the bertsolari “plays” a role. The function of bertsolaritza is not so directly one of persuasion compared to other rhetorical genres but is mediated by the artistic and recreational characterisation of the genre. Some years ago, particularly in certain specific performance formats, this mediation was such that the bertsolari rarely had an opportunity to make her/his own voice heard, whereupon the tension mentioned by Sarasua could disappear, with the consequent risk that the performance became spectacle and only that. After a number of years when festivals involving bertsolaritza were prestigious and all the rage, there had been a tendency to claim back those formats in which the bertsolaris feel less mediated (free performance, after dinner events, etc.).

Aristotele, Perelman and others have offered an exhaustive analysis of the different kinds of arguments, as well as their mental organisation and accessibility. The theory of invention seems linked to “common places”, a species of “formal argumental schema” from which concrete arguments are taken:

When one is dealing with hierarchical values or with reinforcing the intensity of cohesion with what these are based on, one can link them to other values or hierarchies in order to consolidate them. But, at the same time, one can also turn to more generalised premises which we call topoi, from which we get the term, topics or the sacred themes of rhetorical dialectics.(63)

These “common places” (topoi in Greek) present a bipolar antithetic structure, and each historical period tends to prioritise one or other of the two extremes. Romanticism, for example, unlike other periods, tended to the ephemeral and the unrepeatable in detriment to the lasting or the constant. A catalogue of the options taken up in each epoch would constitute, according to Perelman, an excellent description or cosmic vision of the period which would:

Provide the possibility of characterising societies, not only for the particular values that had preference, but also for the intensity of agreement which these societies display for one or other member of the pair in the antithetic place.(64)

From these common places the raw material of the argumentation is extracted, the premises on which subsequent articulation is based, explicit or implicitly in a number of argumental structures which Perelman and others have described excellently.

As far as bertsolaritza is concerned, such a study is pending. Amongst the few and unconnected observations that exist, can be mentioned the preference, normal in a country like ours, of the small to the grand. Against the enthymeme, “we have greater numbers, so we will win” (Perelman quoting a French leader), is the typical argument of the bertsolari: “we are not right because we are few”. Little else has been written on this theme: the argumental skill of the bertsolari appears to be thought of as something innate which either one has or not, a question of mere natural genius. Even in the bertso workshops, it is this aspect which is left to the innate ability of each participant while the workshops concentrate on the technical aspects of the bertso, on the mechanics of its construction. In reality, improvised bertsolaritza has hardly been studied at all, somewhat strange in a country which, apart from having its own university, boasts more philologists and communicators than readers!

This research wanting, intuition tells us, nevertheless, that the keys to improvised bertsolaritza can be found in invention, In the procedures and argumental resources of the bertsolaris, when performing solo and, above all, when in improvised oral confrontation.

After witnessing the bertsolaris championship of 1997, in live session, and invited by the Bertsozale Elkartea association, Maximiano Trapero, the highest authority in sung improvisation by decimistas and troveros, admirably encapsulated the essentially argumental character of bertsolaritza:

… the art of the bertsolaris lies more with the argumentation within than with an elaborate wordiness of the poem, such that one has wait until the end of each bertso to fully perceive the poetic achievements of the improvisation. The themes which they are given demand the sensibility of a poet, but no less a requirement of logical, argued reasoning in which, the more daring it is, the more original and surprising it is.(65)

If this enormous deficit in research into improvised bertsolaritza is to be remedied, then it would not be a bad idea to start precisely with this aspect of invention, of the argumental strategies of the bertsolaris, given that it is here that the essence of the improvising art of the bertsolaris appears to lie. In this, too, lies the main difference between bertsolaritza and other manifestations of improvisation, such as the Latin American decimistas and troveros.

Apart from this, we can say that, unlike the ancient orators and the majority of modern communicators, the bertsolari improviser has very few seconds to find and construct suitable arguments.

Nevertheless, this form of being under pressure is compensated by the possibility of using arguments that would be employed in non-improvised genres with difficulty. We refer, of course, to all those extra-textual elements which form part of the communicative act of bertsolaritza. So the bertsolari can use as arguments things as different as:

• The situational references (fellow bertsolaris, the public, place and time of the event…).
• The tunes employed, most of which are associated, in the minds of the listeners, with a specific text. The use of a suitable air evokes this associated text and allows the bertsolari to say more than is actually said textually: the melody assures the presence, in the minds of the audience, of a text which the bertsolari is not going to utter. From here on, there are two possibilities. One is to use the evocation as a mere reinforcement of the explicitly sung discourse (using, for example, a tune associated with a nursery rhyme in a theme where the improviser is a parent who has to tell a bed-time story). The second possibility, more in tune with the distancing character of current bertsolaritza, is using the evocation as contrast, as antithesis of the explicitly sung discourse (using, for example, the same air when the theme demands the characterisation of a politician at the hustings).
• The different cadences in singing, the intensity of the voice, rhythm.
• Gestures and body language.

As can be seen, it is not easy to isolate the tasks inherent in invention form the corresponding ones in style. In fact, later, when we deal with style and delivery, we will have to repeat some of the comments made here. This is not at all unusual, as the distinction between the five canons of rhetoric is, as said before, merely a methodological one which allows the “analysis and study, separately, of what are just parts of a single rhetoric totality”. If it is true that, in any other genre of rhetoric, the five canons develop and interact simultaneously and continually, it is even more true for improvised bertsolaritza, in which the bertsolari is under pressure to carry out his labour of rhetoric in a question of seconds.

Mañukorta and I. Elortza Source: XDZ