Daily Inspiration Quote by Leslie Fiedler

"I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

About this Quote

Fiedler is pretending to be the straight man in a joke where modernism is the heckler. The line borrows the breezy rhythm of a Broadway farce title ("A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum") and smashes it into the granite prestige of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, that famously unreadable cathedral of literary ambition. The comedy lands because it demotes the sacred object: Wake isn’t a summit to be conquered so much as a chaotic neighborhood you wander through and come back with a story.

The intent is self-portrait by misdirection. Fiedler casts his criticism not as dutiful exegesis but as anecdote, mishap, encounter. That choice is ideological. It implies that the critic’s job isn’t to translate high art into obedient reverence; it’s to register what happens to a living mind when it collides with an overengineered masterpiece. The subtext is a gentle refusal of academic piety: if the Wake is the ultimate text, then the ultimate response might be laughter, not footnotes.

Context matters: Fiedler built a career needling the boundaries between "high" and "low", between canonical seriousness and popular appetite. This quip compresses that lifelong project into a single move: treating the most intimidating modernist artifact as a setup line for a personal, reportable experience. He’s also signaling a critical method - criticism as narrative, criticism as performance - where the critic’s voice is not an embarrassment to be scrubbed out, but the instrument that makes the encounter legible and, crucially, fun.

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Topic	Witty One-Liners
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About the Author

Leslie Fiedler (March 8, 1917 - January 29, 2003) was a Critic from USA.

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