Vaudeville philosophers: "The Killers." - short story by Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Ron Berman

Nick and George begin to understand that the two kinds of questions imply each other. When they separately ask "what's the idea?" they mean the idea for doing as they are told; but the reader, a party to the dialogue, will understand that the idea refers more to Plato than to Ole Andreson. The idea referred to is the idea of meaning in action, and also of meaning in life. That there should be no "idea" for moving behind the counter is an intellectual irritant, but if there is no "idea" for doing or explaining anything or coping with fate, then the problem is much larger. It undercuts the basis for their lives. But their lives have been both moral and unreflective, which is why Max and Al are so contemptuous of bright boys who are thinkers.

Max and Al, themselves far more intelligent than they appear, know that one kind of question implies the other. To want to know something implies that something is to be known, that a given course of action has a universal consequence, that all parties look at the issue in more or less the same way - although William James, wryly brilliant and in a Hobbesian mood, understood

what the words good, bad, and obligation severally mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds. ("Moral Philosopher" 150)

It would be a safe bet that Max and Al know this "idea."

One of the great passages in the story moves with stunning clarity from one form of the same question to its metaphysical shadow:

"Well, bright boy," Max said, looking into the mirror, "why don't you say something?"

"What's it all about?"

"Hey, Al," Max called, "bright boy wants to know what it's all about."

"Why don't you tell him?" Al's voice came from the kitchen.

"What do you think it's all about?"

"I don't know." (282)

By the time this part of the dialogue finishes, Nick realizes that the here and now may not be related to any universal. That particular problem is part of a much larger problem about intelligibility. In 1925, a short time before this story appeared, John Dewey had suggested in an essay on "Nature, Ends and Histories" that the historically naive mind began "with a ready-made list of good things or perfections which it was the business of nature to accomplish" (1: 84). And so it is for what James called the mind of the ordinary American who expects to see in the world the order he has so confidently but wrongly imposed on it. But not for those like Max and Al - messengers from modernism - who know that decision, action, and consequence are relative. Perhaps there is no meaning in life, no morality for causation, no guiding universal. As to the last, reality being purely situational, there are certain things you never know at the time.

As Dewey put the matter, it would be deeply confused to think that expectations matched actualities (1: 88). It would be splendid if the American social order reflected a good and moral universe - but rather a lot of hard work remained to make the world what one hoped it was. One might fail, at that. Also in 1925, in "Existence, Ideas and Consciousness," Dewey argued that "events which brutely occur and brutely affect us" must be converted into meaning, must have "probable consequences." Otherwise, "philosophy finds itself in a hopeless impasse" (1: 245). Wilson seems to have been purposive and contextual in choosing to state outcomes in terms of their "pointlessness." Max and Al may not have been reading either John Dewey or Edmund Wilson, but Hemingway knows about that impasse.