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With striking insight Mailer goes to the very mysterious heart of Hemingway’s magical influence as a creative writer: mastery of the alchemical power of everyday American speech as poetry. With remarkable accuracy, he perceives that the prominence of Hemingway as a writer resides in the wonderful things he does with the English language or, more precisely, with the American colloquial speech. Mailer sees the rare enchantment that Hemingway can work by eliciting a feeling in the reader that true wonders await him or her merely by reading on. He also hints at his appreciation of Hemingway’s meiotic style, and what he could achieve with a minimal poetic diction at the lexical and semantic levels of the language. It is little wonder that Mailer also liked to read the Belgian born French writer Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret series. Simenon, too, practiced a totally unornamented, uncluttered, minimalist style that approached Hemingway’s.{{efn|On Mailer’s appreciation of Georges Simenon’s detective fiction, please see Dwayne Raymond’s ''Mornings with Mailer.''{{sfn|Raymond|2010|p=174}} For more extensive discussions of Hemingway’s meiotic stylistics and the role that the concepts of primal silence and the invisible plays in it please see my articles “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and “The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible.}} Hemingway, too,{{pg|169|170}}
With striking insight Mailer goes to the very mysterious heart of Hemingway’s magical influence as a creative writer: mastery of the alchemical power of everyday American speech as poetry. With remarkable accuracy, he perceives that the prominence of Hemingway as a writer resides in the wonderful things he does with the English language or, more precisely, with the American colloquial speech. Mailer sees the rare enchantment that Hemingway can work by eliciting a feeling in the reader that true wonders await him or her merely by reading on. He also hints at his appreciation of Hemingway’s meiotic style, and what he could achieve with a minimal poetic diction at the lexical and semantic levels of the language. It is little wonder that Mailer also liked to read the Belgian born French writer Georges Simenon’s detective Jules Maigret series. Simenon, too, practiced a totally unornamented, uncluttered, minimalist style that approached Hemingway’s.{{efn|On Mailer’s appreciation of Georges Simenon’s detective fiction, please see Dwayne Raymond’s ''Mornings with Mailer.''{{sfn|Raymond|2010|p=174}} For more extensive discussions of Hemingway’s meiotic stylistics and the role that the concepts of primal silence and the invisible plays in it please see my articles “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and “The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible.}} Hemingway, too,{{pg|169|170}}


admired Simenon’s fiction, which he originally discovered in the 1920s in Paris.


Let us take a closer look at Mailer’s view of Hemingway’s centrality to twentieth century American writing. In any human community our fellow human beings always surround us in the circle of their ontological presence as the horizon of our life. As a consequence, the notion of occupying the “very center” in such communities spells out a position of unquestionable eminence and prominence. Mailer readily credits Hemingway with the central position in writing in the community of writers in America. In a Playboy interview, conducted by his son John Buffalo Mailer, he spoke of Hemingway’s “prodigious influence for young American writers. He taught a lot of us how to look for the tensile strength of a sentence.”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=122}}
Combining these related declarations about centrality is irresistible. First, because lexically “center” indicates the principal, pivotal, and radial point within a circle or sphere. The center comprises the focal point of the circumference that it defines. Second, the grammatical notion “sentence” defines the foundational, generative, syntactical unit of language. The sentence constitutes the center of our meaningful oral and scriptural discourse. It follows then that the maximal stress that a sentence as the basic unit of discourse may bear is essential. The sentence must do so without syntactically imploding into semantic nonsense. Mailer’s statements pay austere but high homage to Hemingway. The older writer comes through Mailer’s considered opinion as the high priest of creative writing in twentieth-century American writing. Judged by any standard, that is high praise, spontaneously offered. At the same time, it bears witness to the challenge that Hemingway as a writer posed to Mailer and how he dealt with it.
'''V. OUTLINE OF A VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION'''
<blockquote>
Examples of greatness lie about us, living texts of renown. Let each set before himself the greatest in his line, not so much as something to follow as something to spur him on.{{sfn|Gracián|2008|p=25}}
</blockquote>
The centrality Mailer attributes to Hemingway among American writers would be seldom, if ever, far from his own mind during his writing life. It acquired the invisible center in his own gravity in his own writing. Initially,{{pg|170|171}}


=== Notes ===
=== Notes ===
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