In this fascinating and well-researched work, Michael Buonanno invites readers into the world of Carolingian chivalry as represented in Sicilian popular puppet theater. Those familiar with Sicilian popular culture will know that puppet-shows, in particular puppet-shows depicting the exploits of the pious knights of Emperor Charlemagne against the Saracens, constitute an important and enduring element of Sicily’s cultural identity. Buonanno’s work advances on existing scholarship on Sicilian marionette theater (most only available to readers of Italian), by analyzing the cultural importance and social function of the Paladin stories to Sicilians, as well as looking at how the narratives about Paladin knights, bequeathed from the French Chansons de Geste, acquired a distinctly Palermitan character.
The enduring appeal of these Paladin adventures, according to Buonanno, is that they articulate a certain Sicilian identity and offer criticism of social relations existent in modern Palermo. As Buonanno outlines in the first chapter, these chivalric tales were able to do this because of their capacity to absorb tropes and features from a range of other well-known, indigenous narratives from Sicilian puppet theater, most notably farces, saints’ lives, and bandit tales. This not only involved the appearance of certain stock character-types—such as comic characters from farces—in the Paladin tales, with whom Charlemagne’s knights could interact, it also meant that the Paladin knights themselves could take on the characteristics, as well as voices, of these familiar characters from other narratives. For Buonanno, it is precisely this multi-generic, multi-dialogic nature that enables the Carolingian narratives to comment on and critique Palermitan society. Buonanno argues that each character depicted in the Paladin narratives—be they knight, bandit, farcical character—represents, in the eyes of Palermitan audiences, a certain sector of Palermitan society: the knights represent the aristocracy and the ruling classes, the bandit the Mafioso, the saint the clergy, and the farcical character the people. Thus, in seeing characters in this way, “the Palermitan audience rhetorically recasts epic in its own image and, thereby, allows epic to comment upon Palermitan social order” (124).
Buonanno then dedicates chapters 2-5 to substantiating this argument. In these chapters, he compares five episodes from the Carolingian Cycle with five indigenous folk-narratives taken from different genres of popular puppet theater. Through this, Buonanno seeks to demonstrate the incursion of other genres into the Paladin narratives, and offers an interpretation of the meanings of these episodes. In chapter 3, for instance, Buonanno argues that the interaction of the young knight Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, with comic characters Nofrio and Virticchio—archetypical comic characters from farce—represents Roland’s fraternity with the people of Palermo, thus carrying the implicit message that the ruling classes must reconcile themselves with the people if their rule is to be legitimate.
In most instances, Buonanno makes a convincing argument; certain sectors of Palermitan society do indeed seem to appear depicted in Paladin puppetry, and certain values, centered on honor and legitimate rule, do appear to be espoused. At times, however, Buonanno pushes his analysis too far. In chapter 7, Buonanno argues that the death of Roland, who stood for saintly qualities of obedience and forgiveness, and the survival of Renaud, who embodied the bandit values of rebelliousness and vengeance, represent the triumph of a value code centered on the bandit qualities of revenge and retribution, rather than on the aristocratic ideal of deference. This is a reasonable interpretation, but Buonanno takes his analysis one step further by arguing that this value-code “conforms to the ideal of honor extant among the people [of Palermo],” and that this explains why the roguish Renaud is so universally adored over the punctilious Roland (152). At this point Buonanno’s argument becomes rather circular. He uses the content of the narratives to assess the supposed value-codes of the audiences, and the audience’s supposed values to explain the significance of the narratives. This view of Palermitan audiences is also based on unqualified assumptions about the value-systems of the people of Palermo. The notion that any “ideal of honor” whatsoever exists in the Palermitan people seems to be predicated on certain received ideas about Sicilians, and their emotional dispositions, rather than on any actual evidence. Thus, this particular section of Buonanno’s work remains a little unconvincing.
In other ways, too, Buonanno’s ideas could have been more carefully thought out. For one thing, Buonanno does not consider that other social and occupational groups—alongside the aristocracy, the people, the Mafia, and the clergy—may have been represented in the Paladin puppet plays. For Buonanno, the bandit character always represents the Mafioso, the saint character always the clergy. This reading is, I believe, shaped by Buonanno’s own view of Palermitan society. Buonanno sees the Mafia, the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people as the sole subjects of puppet theater because these are precisely the constituent bodies which he believes comprise Palermitan society, as he informs us in chapter 8. This quadripartite vision of Palermitan society has, I suspect, closed off Buonanno’s analysis of the narratives in terms of representations of other social groups. Palermo has for many centuries been a much more complex social organism, and it seems inconceivable that other demographics—the police-officer, the soldier, the land-owning bourgeoisie, the peripatetic peddler, the vagrant—would not also have been represented by characters in the Carolingian narratives. This is something that Buonanno does not consider.
Despite this, Buonanno’s book is still an expert, articulate, and sensitive work, and a valuable contribution to the (almost entirely Italian-language) scholarship on Sicilian puppetry. Buonanno not only brings the Carolingian Cycle in all its glory to English-speaking readers, but also offers some insightful and intelligent interpretations of certain episodes of this epic cycle and tackles important questions about the genre’s cultural and social importance. Buonanno unpacks and demystifies the Paladin narratives with confidence and authority. Anybody interested in Sicilian popular culture and identity would most certainly benefit from this work.
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[Review length: 966 words • Review posted on March 4, 2015]