Academic Life

One reason for my blog is an attempt to merge my academic life into my personal life. I believe literature is equipment for living and essential for our humanity. So, for those interested, and those not, here are the beginnings of a paper I am working on. Mind you, it’s a work in progress and it’s far from finished.

Thirst Knows No Season: Mythic Ideology of Coca-Cola in McCarthy’s The Road

“Wherever you go you will find Coca-Cola to refresh the parched throat, to invigorate the fatigued body, and to quicken the tired brain.” Not even the apocalypse debunks this prophetic advertisement of Coke’s 1905 ad campaign. Coca-Cola, America’s iconic symbol of mass consumption, is as wide reaching as the unknown catastrophe in McCarthy’s latest fiction. In the world of The Road, names carry little consequence: names of colors, birds, and things to eat, have slowly fallen into oblivion. But Coca-Cola makes a triumphal début:

By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola. (22-23)

The man and his son, in what appears to be a commercial pulled straight from Coke’s archives, bond over the drink which momentarily refreshes their parched throats, invigorates their fatigued bodies, and quickens their tired brains.

From its concoction in 1886, Coke has promised its consumers elixir-like qualities; originally brewed as a medication, the beverage was advertized as the “Ideal Brain Tonic” (1897) capable of curing headaches and relieving mental and physical exhaustion. Creating their own mythology, Coke has run one of the most successful ad campaigns in American history. The company has worked to forge an ideology for its customers, one that promotes the product and its consumers as a part of a global family of happy, peaceful, refreshed drinkers. Over the last century-and-a-half, Coke consumers have been told: “The Pause That Brings Friends Together” (1935); “Happy Moment of Hospitality” (1945) and perhaps the most famous, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” (1971). In the stark world of The Road however, the hollowness of these promises are ultimately realized. The mythology the red can of Coke invokes when the man and the boy bond over the soft drink is but 140 empty calories as black and colorless as the world around them. Using Coca-Cola as a general representation of the false realities of consumerism, The Road taps into Coke’s mythic past and juxtaposes it with the novel’s horrific present to seemingly criticize consumer culture as a whole.

My paper will be a significant contribution to McCarthy scholarship because, utilizing Cultural Criticism as a framework for my ideas, it will examine the mythic ideology of Coca-Cola and place it into the context of The Road. Just like McCarthy’s fiction, Coke has its genesis in the South. An understanding of the historical context of the Southern soft drink will inevitably bring new insight into McCarthy’s writing. Coca-Cola plays a vital role in the novel and its presence is worth our scrutiny. After all: it’s the only proper noun in the narrative.

Well, what do you think?