The Real Thing: Coca-Cola, Kant, and Henry James

“I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” Coca-Cola commercial, 1971

Last week, I said that River Deep, Mountain High has the sappiest lyrics in the world.  I spoke too soon.  Browsing the internet the other day, I discovered this song in a commercial the Coca-Cola company aired during the summer of 1971.  An anthem more than a jingle, it is sung by a diverse crowd of young people on a hilltop bathed in late afternoon light. (Click here)

	I’d like to buy the world a home
	And furnish it with love
	Grow apple trees and honey bees
	And snow-white turtle-doves
	I’d like to teach the world to sing
	In perfect harmony
	I’d like to buy the world a coke
	And keep it company
	That’s the real thing …
	Coke is what the world wants today
	It’s the real thing

Real compared to what?  When this spot was running, the American adventure in Viet Nam was going down in flames, American cities were still wounded by the anguished riots that tore through them after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the Weather Underground had recently exploded a bomb in a men’s room at the Capitol Building, and that is just a short list of the unsettling news.  In the United States, reality was not primarily an affair of apple trees and honeybees.  Nonetheless, a logician might point out that a bottle of coke is just as real as the My Lai massacre of 1968 or the Attica Prison massacre carried out in September 1971.  But no one talks of “the real thing” in the hope of engaging our aptitude for logic.  A remarkably manipulative piece of language, it’s a phrase designed to energize tangles of attitudes and beliefs.

Think of it, the dreadful genius of the ad men who came up with words, music, and pictures with the power to persuade large audiences that the parade of disasters skittering across their television screens was just a tedious mirage, that the real was the feel of a cold coke bottle in your hand, the taste of coke in your mouth.  I am not saying everyone bought this pitch or that anyone bought it completely; still, the Coca-Cola company received 100,000 letters of thanks for the ad and not one but two versions of the song, with “Coke” excised, rose high on the Billboard charts.  It was a hit.  Because who doesn’t love the real thing?  Or reject the unreal thing?
In The Critique of Judgment, 1790, Immanuel Kant presents a picture of “a quiet summer evening bathed in the soft light of the moon;” from a “lonely thicket” comes “the lovely and bewitching note of the nightingale.”  So far so good.  Then it turns out that the bird’s song is the sound of a flute played by a boy hidden in the bushes.  According to Kant, the moment the “fraud” is revealed, “no one will be willing to listen to a song that, just a moment earlier, was considered so charming.”  When listeners thought the nightingale’s song was the real thing, its delicate melody awakened their imaginations to the fullness of Nature with a capital “N.”  A bird had taken them to the heart of reality at its most beautiful and reassuring, or so Kant argues.  The revelation of the boy with a flute ruined a moment of certainty about the world’s fundamental goodness.  

There is no room in Kant’s system for admiration of the flute player’s artifice.  Nor does art occupy a large place.  Yet art, like nature, offers us beauty, which, the philosopher says, we must necessarily find delightful.  The Critique of Judgment is a vast, sometimes elegant machine for producing certainties and necessities.  Kant takes no interest in differences of taste—truly aesthetic judgments, he says, are universal—nor does he acknowledge mimicry’s ambiguous allure.  He wanted to hear the real, not the make-believe nightingale.  And in the 1950s Willem de Kooning’s admirers wanted to see traces of real emotions in the painter’s brushwork, not a bravura performance.  Long ago, Alex Katz told me that the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby rejected the idea that his friend Willem de Kooning painted to express himself.  He is an impersonal painter, a classicist, said Denby.  This is a provocative thought, but is it true?  Did the poet unveil the real painter?  Put a de Kooning next to a canvas by an indubitable classicist—Nicolas Poussin, for example—and you be the judge.  Or don’t.  Because if you insist on deciding exactly what kind of painter de Kooning is or is not, you will have to blind yourself to much in his art that works against certainty.  A fixation on the real thing can lead you astray, as Henry James suggests in a story from 1892.

A treatise on art as much as a proper story, James’s “The Real Thing” is delivered in the voice of a would-be portrait painter who survives by drawing illustrations for magazines and books.  A publisher engages him to contribute to an edition of novels about genteel English life, on the condition that he produce suitable samples.  Luckily for him, it seems, he receives a visit from a couple who look as if they have stepped from the pages of the books he hopes to illustrate.  They are, as they say, “the real thing.”  The trouble is that every time these personages pose for the artist, his drawings turn out badly: flat, inert, unconvincing.  He gets better results when his models are un-genteel people with a knack for impersonating characters entirely unlike themselves.  The moral of the story is that art in whatever medium is artifice, make-believe, fiction.  The purpose of art is not to tell the truth or shine a spotlight on the real thing.  Its purpose is to challenge us to make whatever sense of it we can.  A work of art is an invitation to interpret—to find meaning, significance, and possibly a fresh sense of oneself. 

As for Coke, it is a real thing but not the real thing.  The word “the” makes this slippery phrase useful chiefly as an honorific: this Mai Tai is the real thing, just like the ones I used to get at Trader Vic’s (as if Trader Vic were the arbiter of reality), or I can always count on her, she is the real thing.  Yet the one you can’t count on is just as real, in his or her way.  As Parmenides says in his roundabout fashion, the only thing deserving to be called the real thing is everything: the sum total of all that is.