Souls and Slippers

My roommate’s grandmother recently sent her home with a box full of old sweaters. As she unpacked them and held them up one by one, our laughter echoed off the walls of her bedroom. My favorite was baby pink, and it had yellow sequins on the front and back in a floral pattern only a grandma could get away with. Upon unpacking these costumes, my roommate immediately replaced them in the box and shoved them to the back of her closet, probably never to be seen again.

This should have been the fate shared by the toreador jackets worn by some of the bidders described in Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” In this short story, Rushdie’s narrator is attending an auction at which the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, among other things, are up for sale. While making bids of his own, the narrator plays the part of wallflower, surveying the items on lot, and the people who will pay nearly any price for them. The social commentary and criticism that the narrator’s observations achieve are to be found in the relationship between the people and the “stuff,” but the bigger insight, that into Rushdie himself, lies in what the narrator sees and the way he describes what he sees.

Considering the characters and objects involved, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” can be labeled safely as absurd, but underneath the colorful spectacle is a message worthy of note. Among the attendees, making the spectacle more colorful, are movie stars with “glossy, spangled auras…priceless (and fragile),” avid collectors, or “memorabilia junkies” as the narrator names them, and a whole slew of Oz characters, minus the Tinman “on account of the particular discomfort of the costume” (88-89). These bidders, and others, vie to put a price on things believed to be beyond the grasp of financial ownership: the Swiss Alps, government secrets, and “a wide selection of human souls of all classes, qualities, ages, races, and creeds” (98). As a reader, one is left with a sense of incredulity at the items on-lot. The outlandish prizes, though - the human souls in particular - emphasize the fact that we do not decide our own value, and that this value in fact fluctuates as different people define us. As the narrator states in the story’s closing, “Thanks to the infinite bounty of Auctioneers, any of us…can be - as we long to be; and as…we fear we are not - somebody” (103).

I refuse to call the narrator “Rushdie-ish,” for I don’t know enough of Rushdie as an individual in order to attempt a definition, let alone expand that into a comparison. I will consent, though, that the narrator is as much Rushdie as any other protagonist is the result of its author’s influence. Ultimately, though, the narrator does seem to be drawing from the experience of Rushdie’s banishment. For example, in attendance at the auction are political refugees, exiles, orphans, and “untouchables,” people who all have a desire and inability to go “home” (90-94). In one sense or another, Rushdie is all of these. Even the narrator puts himself in this category by telling the story of himself and his cousin Gale (95); when the narrator stops bidding for the ruby slippers, he lets go of his idea of Gale, his idea of home (102). This is Rushdie’s subtle acknowledgement that even if he is granted the ability to return home, his life won’t be the same; home won’t mean what it used to.

As the auction commences, we, as readers, are completely drawn in, and we know nothing of the world outside. This is true until, “There’s an explosion in the street outside. We hear running feet, sirens, screams.” When we learn that “Such things have become commonplace,” it forces us to imagine where this story is taking place, and the kind of horrors that might take place in an everyday kind of way. The narrator gives no insight, but instead moves on with “we are absorbed by a higher drama” (101). The superficiality in which the characters in this story are absorbed may best be reflected in the image of “sport toreador jackets bearing sequined representations of … the Disasters of War sequence by Francisco Goya” (91). This glamorization and defacement of tragic events, this glossing over, is ridiculous, yes, but echoes of the problem Rushdie is facing. In the time of his banishment, great conflict is happening in the Middle East, and instead of focusing on this, Iran’s political and religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, is exerting energy on sentencing a novelist to death, and placing a bounty on his head that eventually exceeds $5 million. What else could Rushdie’s narrator have been thinking of when he reiterated the idea of fiction as “dangerous” (98)?

In an interview before he went into hiding, Rushdie made a comment that he wished he had written “a more critical book” (Steve Lohr, “Rushdie Expresses Regret to Muslims for Book’s Effect”). In this auction where a person’s soul, or head, can go to the highest bidder, I believe Rushdie achieves his desired level of criticism.