Success Quote by Leslie Fiedler

There is a rare kind of confidence hiding inside Fiedler's wish to be surpassed: the assurance that the work mattered enough to deserve demolition. As a critic who spent a career poking holes in American literary self-mythology, he frames artistic progress not as polite succession but as a coup. "Blow everything I've done out of the water" borrows the language of war and spectacle, turning the anxiety of obsolescence into a fantasy of cleansing force. The sting is deliberate: if someone can erase him "in a beautiful way", then his own project of disruption has succeeded.

The subtext is a rebuke to cultural gatekeeping. Critics often become institutions, protecting their categories, their canons, their terms of debate. Fiedler imagines the opposite: a critic as a temporary scaffolding meant to be kicked away once the building stands. The line also signals a distaste for incrementalism. He doesn't ask to be "built on"; he asks for a rupture that "clears the way" - a phrase that casts tradition as brush to be cut back so new growth can happen.

Contextually, this sits neatly with a 20th-century American critic who helped popularize the idea that literature should be read against its own pieties (race, sex, the frontier, innocence). Late in life, when reputations calcify, he refuses the comforting script of legacy. He stakes his afterlife on the next writer or thinker having the nerve to commit a better crime.