Malamud, Bernard - Irving H. Buchen (essay date spring 1990)
Irving H. Buchen (essay date spring 1990)
SOURCE: Buchen, Irving H. “Malamud's Italian Progress: Art and Bisexuality.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 2 (spring 1990): 64-78.
[In the following essay, Buchen explores the relationship in Pictures of Fidelman between life as an artist and the protagonist's final embrace of bisexuality.]
Every experience that is not converted into a voluptuous one is a failure.
—E. H. Cioran. Precis de Decomposition (1949)
Pictures of Fidelman begins in Rome, moves north to Milano, makes a temporary stop in Naples, and concludes in Venice. In the process Fidelman spiritually travels from critic to painter to craftsman; from a self-centered, grasping often obsessive son of a bitch to a lover of men and women; from a celebrator of sublime art to a witness to life and art. The work is “A Painter's Progress” (169)1 and circular; it...
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