Style: the poetic function in improvised bertsolaritza

3.5 Style: the poetic function in improvised bertsolaritza

Style is the endeavour to formulate the arguments of the rhetoric discourse in a suitable way. That is, it is in style that the element of poetry in the rhetorical activity is located. As we have seen, the importance of style is greater in the epideictic genre in which we have placed improvised bertsolaritza, than in other rhetoric genres.

The disproportionate development of this aspect of rhetoric activity is the reason for rhetoric’s historical loss of prestige. Lacking in practical application, reduced to a mere academic exercise, rhetoric lost sight of those aspects relating to invention and to a lesser degree, arrangement, to become a mere device in which the brilliance of the formulations became the sole aim. From this stems the overtones of “vacuous waffle” which the word “rhetoric” has acquired in our times:

Eloquence, closed away in the schools, is reduced to the contrived exhibition of the “declamations” and the study of rhetorical precepts.(72)

The study of style broke away from the original theoretical branch, lost its orientation towards the exercise of political and judicial eloquence and the exercise of eulogistic (and, following the consolidation of Christianity, predicative) discourses, established ever closer links with poetry, and extended its jurisdiction to all types of discourse in poetry and prose.

The latter component of the binomial term “poetic rhetoric” which is still in use is a true synecdoche, in that it refers to the whole (rhetoric) when it means a part (the theory of elecutio).

It is the part, however, which has prevailed and which use and common sense identify with the complete discipline. Or, if you prefer, it is an example of antonomasia: that which is, or was, the object of style is, par excellence, the object of rhetoric.(73)

It is not surprising that the rehabilitation of rhetoric, started by Perelman, among others, in the middle of the 20th century is, to a large extent, a redemption of rhetoric in its entirety, an attempt to return to invention the lost relevance and to restrict style to its natural limits within the rhetoric totality.

In classifying improvised bertsolaritza as a poetic genre we are falling into the same error which provoked the historical discrediting of rhetoric, reducing bertsolaritza to what is no more than one of its parts: style, the poetic formulation of the arguments and contents.

To state that style is but one of the parts of rhetoric, in the case of bertsolaritza, doesn’t mean denying the importance of the poetic in the art of bertsolaritza. Such importance is, as we have seen, in accordance with the rhetoric circumstances of bertsolaritza in each epoch. The weaker the co-textual homogeneity, the greater the importance that the text acquires and, along with the text, the poetic. We shouldn’t then confuse the poetic excellence of the text with the excellence of the bertso itself. In certain circumstances, a textually poor bertso can be an excellent rhetoric piece. If we confuse the two, if we forget that bertsolaritza is a rhetoric genre and we try to analyse it from the purely poetic, whether oral or written, the result will not always be satisfactory even though the analysis be carried out in good faith.

We believe that this is what happens to Juan Mari Lekuona when he analyses the bertsos of Udarregi, an illiterate 19th century bertsolari. To start with, Lekuona begins from an affirmation: Udarregi must be a good bertsolari, given that in his time he was entrusted with the job of providing “bertsolaristic services” in his region. However, the known bertsos of Udarregi (almost all of them dictated bertsos, not strictly speaking improvised) do not seem to be at the level (poetic, textual) of his fame as a great bertsolari:

In no way comparable to the bertsolaritza of Bilintx, all a feast of the imagination; nor to the sensitivity of a P.M. Otaño, with his pure but at the same time popular, Euskera; nor is it so universal as Iparragirre, imbued with the romantic tendencies of the Europe of the time.

The bertsolaritza of Udarregi seems to Lekuona “radically different” from that of the bertsolaris mentioned and as a result he decides as the only possible mode of analysis, to reach for rhetoric:

For this reason, to analyse the bertsolaritza of this bertsolari from Usurbil, it has seemed best to us to analyse his sentences by applying the method and procedures of rhetoric.(74)

Lekuona had already mentioned the suitability of the rhetoric model for the analysis of bertsolaritza:

The improvising bertsolari, as well as poet and singer is also orator. This rhetoric technique is essential for the improvised song. The most impressive thing is that the improvising bertsolari executes all the rhetoric exercises –inventing the arguments, arranging them in a suitable order and formulating them in a beautiful way- simultaneously in the few seconds at his disposal.(75)

For all our admiration of Lekuona we believe that he doesn’t draw all the consequences of this affirmation of the rhetoric character, an affirmation which we share. The theoretical framework which we present here is, to a certain extent, no more than a coherent development of what Lekuona suggests.

It is not that the bertsolari is orator “as well as poet”, but rather that he is, above all, orator and, like all orators, has to have also a poetic training which he develops more or less according to the rhetoric requirements of each moment. The case of Udarregi, far from being an exception, is the general rule of bertsolaritza. Although not lacking in works of great poetic value, the corpus of bertsolaritza is full of bertsos whose merits are inexplicable from a purely poetic point of view.

Having said this, we should add that it would be opportune to carry out an exhaustive study of the poetic resources of improvised bertsolaritza by epoch and by bertsolari. It seems obvious that such a study would reveal a greater poetic density in the present-day bertsolaris than in the period prior to 1980, barring exceptions like Lazkao Txiki, and above all, Xalbador.