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Simone Cristina Motta Reis Eliana Loureno de Lima Reis Critical Theories 2 July 2013 Analyzing At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers Ironic and grotesque stories have a great effect on readers. Some, unaware of the irony, might take the story seriously. They may feel shocked, in horror, or at times, a person could agree with whatever the story is ironically saying. These tones of writing are used to call the readers attention to their actions and beliefs when there is an attentive reader. They are magnified to disturb readers, taking them out of their comfort zone and instigating them to act upon what they read. At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers, by Salman Rushdie, is a good example of this kind of story. In this essay I intend to discuss the short-story through two main topics. First I will discuss the commodification of objects and feelings, as well as the intense effects of Late Capitalism on that society. Second, I will talk about the idea/ illusion of home and its symbols. I intend to discuss these topics using different literary theories to show, as I hope to conclude, that Rushdie uses extreme irony in order to criticize our postmodern/capitalist society. Salman Rushdies short story describes an extremely capitalist society where one bids on auctions for just about anything from edible underwear to the Eiffel Tower. I would argue that this story accounts for a brutal capitalism which can be read from a Marxist point of view as: A socio-economic system based especially on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the labor force1. The main character gives us an uncanny description of what happens in his time. He describes a community where people bid, the Auctioneers knock a lot down, we pass on. (99) .This seems to be a place where life is measured by the things you can buy [at auctions]. He also mentions, without a tone of anger, acts of total disregard for human life, such as the astronaut who is trapped in space due to lack of funds to bring him back to Earth, as if leaving a human being to die was something ordinary. After all, the tone is ironic; it is as if the narrator finds this situation natural. Here we can perceive a distancing from compassion, which is a sign of the numbness that occurred in that society; people and objects were the same. Some people were shot with tranquilizers, as animals, and later thrown to dogs; it seems that this is an image we can associate with war times. I believe the reason that such atrocities occurred in the story was because of that
1

Taken from the website

Reis 2 societys ideology. According to Michael Ryan in the chapter about Marxism in his book Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction, ideology is a way of legitimating or justifying social and economic arrangements that might otherwise appear unjust. Moreover, Those who rule or possess economic power need to convince everyone else that the arrangement of the world is reasonable, or natural, or good (53). I would argue that the Auctioneers could be viewed as the ruling class, and are in control of that societys financial situation, since It is to the Auctioneers we go to establish the value of our past, of our futures, of our lives (101). The Auctioneers have the power to control the others, whose economic power is not high enough. As a result, everything has a price and is treated as a commodity. For one to have value and obtain status in that society, one needs to buy what is offered at auctions. These commodities that are sold at auctions become a fetish. The Cambridge Dictionary defines fetish as an object which is worshipped in some societies because it is believed to have a spirit or special magical powers. This definition, almost a religious one, seems to suit what the ruby slippers represent in the short story. In a culture where commodity fetishism (an endowment of an object or a body part with an unusual degree of power or erotic allure according to the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literature and Cultural Criticism) exists, we are able to see the how social compulsion works, one that Marx theorized and Rushdie criticizes in his story. In commodity fetishism, commodities are given characteristics they do not have in themselves: We revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable (); because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return (92). The slippers are given powers making them worthy worship for their supposed magical powers, similar to the one they has in the movie The Wizard of Oz, leading people on in the idea that these shoes could, somehow change their lives. I believe that the narrator knows about their vulnerability; their lack of money makes this society impossible to live in. In fact, what the Auctioneers referred to as democracy was a system where only money had a definite power to change peoples lives: Anyones cash is as good as anyone elses (93). Thinking about Marxist ideas we could say that there is a commodification of everything. Commodification is The subordination of both private and public realms to the logic of capitalism. In this logic, such things as friendship, knowledge, women, etc. are understood only in terms of their monetary value.2 This phenomenon is even more common
2

Taken from the website http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/terms/

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in Late Capitalism where experiences also become commodities, as well as feelings and desires. Fredrick Jameson on the book Postmodernism: A Reader on the essay entitled Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism connects late capitalism to post modernity as he mentions that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism since it is a purer stage of capitalism (63-4) I would argue that this purer stage is one where everything can become a commodity and therefore can be priced. Here, what is at stake is not simply owning the shoes but is what owning what the shoes represent; the possibility of a better future. These characters want to become the person who has a unique pair of ruby slippers and all the exclusiveness that the shoes can provide for the person who comes to possess them. Through this text, Rushdie criticizes the extreme materialism existing in this extreme capitalist society. The narrator gives us a picture of absurd actions: natural settings and architectural wonders are all given to the highest bidder. I say it is absurd because the possibility of owning, through auctions, The Alps, the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, or the Sphinx, even more impossible to own one of them after an auction. Although it does happen in the present time, this is taken out of proportion to create the ironic tone of the story. Art in this short story has lost its value: the result of mens finest imaginative and perceptive skills by the use of paint, rock, iron and others. Art is for this society similar to any other object; it has, therefore, lost its aura. Important paintings that deal with the suffering of people during war times are now reduced to patterns imprinted in jackets, completely out of context Their importance, to portray the horrors of war, has lost its value, whereas, a pair of ruby slippers product of a popular movie, provoke a huge commotion. This cult of apparently miraculous slippers shows us two things: first, how much people are susceptible to what the others, the hegemonic class, claim to be important in this short-story these would be the Auctioneers, since they are the ones deciding on the importance of goods and also their marketing value. Second, how those people believed that an object could provide salvation from the lives they lived, or in the narrators case, could bring his loved one back. Capitalism, and specially Late Capitalism, has created experts who can price anything, from goods to feelings and experiences. Capitalism has mostly created in people the desire for commodities. Here it is important to make a distinction between desire and need. In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan makes a difference between need and desire. Need is often something you can fulfill biologically: if Im thirsty, I drink water. However, desire is something that you want but it is not a necessity: if Im thirsty, I

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drink water; it is also a substitute for an unconscious need, often the need of the mother. In fact I could drink water but Coke sets me apart from other people. It might make me feel as if I belonged with the right crowd: the cool, good-looking and smart people; similar to the ones we see in Coke advertisements. The desire to buy things and the frequent auctions create a distorted democracy, one that is ruled by money and where status is offered to the higher bidder. Fredric Jameson, uses a key term to understand why this societies ways to function represented by the auction room are so deceiving. He mentions Platos idea of simulacrum an important concept that explains the imaginary value of the ruby slippers. He explains simulacrum as the identical copy for which no original has ever existed, and that the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced (74). Jameson finishes his argument using a quotation from Guy Debord: the image has become the final form of commodity reification (qtq in Postmodernism, 74). I would argue the idea of the simulacrum is similar to the ruby slippers because they have never existed in real life, only in fiction, and therefore, there are no original magical slippers to be found. However, this is of little significance, because what is important is not the originality but the value of these shoes. Art, as well as all cultural products in Salman Rushdies story, is explained by Jameson when he says: Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old nomadic subject, but rather that of a degraded collective object spirit: it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which has once itself a present; rather, as Platos cave, it must trace our mental images of the past upon its confining walls. (79) We are able to see that what happens in this fictional society in Rushdies short-story is also what is happening to our post-modernist culture. Cultural production has lost its power to criticize; it is naturalized and turned into popular images; consequently, we are no longer affected. If before art was a form of resistance and critique, now it has become tainted, not even an object but an object spirit unable to do what its creators intended them to. I would argue that instead of a cave these characters are trapped in the auction house. Their view of the world is not made of shadows but of the consumerism necessary, or better saying, desirable for their survival. Similar to the people in the cave, they can only live under the

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perspective of buying and owning commodities. Money is, much like the shadows, what imprisons most people, who do not have it, and maintains those who are part of the hegemonic class in their privileged location. Another important point to analyze in this short story is the idea of home and its representations. For the protagonist Home has become such a scattered, damaged various concept is our present travails. (93). The description of the environment and the clashes between the people and the authority of the place are suggestive to war imagery, as I mentioned before. They lived in bunkers, places built underground so that people can be protected against war or natural disasters. The only description there is about a kind of neighborhood is of one surrounded by giant advertising hoardings into which we venture no more (91) where people, from other underground places carrying bazookas but also under the influence of drugs, would be deposited and left to be eaten by dogs. Rushdie then, describes a hostile location and many of these people believe the ruby slippers have the power to change this dangerous home into a welcoming one. I believe the narrator shows some level of skepticism concerning the magic powers of the slippers when he questions: How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work?(93). Then, he goes on asking more questions, ultimately discussing the kind of home they all want to return to. If they are given the chance, where would they go? Do they understand what being without a home is? Will they be able to redefine the blessed word? Home is a blessed word because it represents what they are lacking: comfort, peace and the feeling of being whole. Another question he asks himself is: if they do succeed going back home how long will they be there? He wonders if this home he imagines is the same he will be taken to in case he buys the slippers. These questions show us that home is so distant from them that the only way to go back is through fiction. This conflict has no solution in real life, so they have to resolve it by the use of their imagination. This can be analyzed as similar to symbolic action. Paul Fry explains that the symbolic act at the political level is designed to resolve a contradiction that can't be resolved by other means. In other words, it's a fantasy, it is the fairy tale,() It is the arbitrary happy ending tacked onto a situation for which in reality there would be no happy ending.3. This concept was first used by Kenneth Burke an important literary theorist. I believe that the conflict of home, and returning home can only be resolved by means of these fictitious ruby slippers, it cannot be resolved in reality because of the powers of the auctioneers. That is one of the reasons why Dorothys shoes are worshipped, it is as if this is
3

From Yale courses: Paul Frys Introduction To Theory Of Literature -Lecture 18 - The Political Unconscious [March 26, 2009]

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their last chance to return to a paradise, a place of happiness and love. It is their only chance of an impossible happy ending. Home, according to Rosemary Marangoly George in The Politics of Home, immediately connotes the private sphere, () shelter, comfort, nurture and protection (1). Knowing that this society is an exaggerated capitalist community, who values possession it does not need to connote comfort, as George suggest people are being treated as objects, dying because they touched their lips in a glass. Although they seem to be acceptant of their societys ways selling everything to whomever has money home is desire of wholeness in the narrators mind, and therefore worth returning. I would argue that what the main character is looking for is not to call any place home but rather is to feel at home. This is what Avtar Brah argues in the book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. She argues that what the subjects who have been away from home, as the case of the protagonist of this story, do not seek to return, but rather what they want is to feel they belong either to a locality, a person, and a community. It is a homing desire: The homing desire, however, is not the same as the desire for a 'homeland'. Contrary to general belief, not all diasporas sustain an ideology of return. Moreover, the multi-placedness of home in the diasporic imaginary does not mean that diasporian subjectivity is rootless. I argue for a distinction between feeling at home and declaring a place as home. (197) As I mentioned before, being or at least feeling that you are at home has close relation to feeling complete. We can see that the narrators idea of home is not a physical place, it is something he imagines. This idea is present in Salman Rushdies essay Imaginary Homelands, from a homonymous book. There he writes, among many things about the disparity between the real India and the Indias of the mind his imaginary homeland. His home is imaginary because it is very different from India nowadays, creat[ing] fictions, not actual cities and villages, but invisible ones (10). The feeling of being home is something that Gale gives the protagonist while having intercourse. For that reason I believe that Gale is not his idea of home but she provides him the sensation of being at home being whole. Rivkin and Ryan in Literary Theory: An Anthology wrote on the introductory chapter about psychoanalysis that Human desire is carried by signifiers which stand for a lack that can never be filled in. (126). This is one of the reasons why Gale is so important for the narrator; she is the signifier of home. Arjun Appadurai, another important theorist, writes in his book Modernity at Large, in the chapter Disjuncture and Difference in the Global

Reis 7 Cultural Economy, that homeland is partly invented, existing only in the imagination of the deterritorialized groups (49).This is exactly what is happening to the narrator. Since he does not feel complete in his current home, he idealizes one that will give him everything he needs: love, comfort and pleasure. However, this home only exists in his imagination. Similarly to home, Gale is also an imaginative construction of the narrator. We can see this when he says: after years of separation and non-communication, the Gale I adore is not entirely a real person. The real Gale has become confused with my re-imagining of her with my private elaboration of our continuing life together in an alternative universe (96). I believe that it is the same for the protagonist, but his imaginary home is represented by Gale and not a country or city. Therefore, Gale is a symbol of his homing desire. If we read this from the perspective of psychoanalysis, using Lacans ideas, Gale could be considered as an objet petit a a representation of a lost object. She puts the narrator in touch with what he has lost and is desperately trying to regain - his home. He even imagines imitating Dorothys and using her famous words there is no place like home to try to win back her heart as an attempt to be home. Gale is also objectified in the short-story; if we read from the perspective of feminist literary theory the ruby slippers and Gale herself have an equal value for the narrator, that is, the slippers are means to an end. Being so, if he acquires the slippers, consequently he will acquire his loved one back. Gale has no saying on what she wants, except when she is having sexual relations with the narrator. The other instance where she is described is while crying for the inevitable death of the astronaut. This absence of her voice could be a suggestion that Gale wishes are not taken into account, and they are unimportant since this short story is written from a male perspective. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on her essay called Between Men quotes Catherine MacKinnon when talking about societies view on femaleness Socially femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms (701). This is exactly what happens on this short-story; Gale is only seen through the eyes of the male protagonist and thus her qualities are associated to her sexual attractiveness and availability. Both can be purchased according to the narrator. He admits that the real Gale is different from the imagined one. Nevertheless, the possession of her is essential for the narrators well-being. I believe that the extremes read in the short story are not much different from what happens nowadays. They are magnified in order to make the reader think critically about our society. People are often judged and valued for what they can buy and not for who they are or

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their moral values. These traits fall short when money has a higher importance in society. Happiness is something to buy and not construct, or strive for. The narrator tells a tale of hopelessness because it talks about materialistic and shallow people who are stripped down of their Human Rights: to be treated with respect and equality, since the only right anyone is allowed to have is to consume. Come to think of it, these rights have never been fully acquired by all peoples in the capitalist world. The concept that every one of us can have our own and particular sense of happiness and that it does not depend on our financial possessions is a dream, one that the capitalist reality cannot indulge. At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers is an ironic story, because it shows a society overly concerned about money. As we read in the book: Everything was for sale, and under the firm yet essentially benevolent supervision of the Auctioneers. Here we see the power of this hegemonic group. They are described as firm and ironically benevolent. In a capitalist society such as the one we read about, it seems that the only way to have kindness shown to you is by paying for it. They show benevolence in order to allure more and more people to the auctions, guaranteeing their highest profit from what is being sold. It is clear that there is no benevolence, but brute force and indifference for peoples welfare. For that reason they do not reject anyone not even inter-denominational bunch of smoldering red daemons who were there for the auction of souls. This passage in specific I believe that Rushdie is aiming at shocking religious people, in specific, with this part of the story. Especially for Christians the soul is considered their most important asset; it is how humans have gained life, as we read in Genesis 2 verse 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature., and it is also how they are going to reach immortality, as we read in 1st Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 16: For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Rushdie is especially ironic when he mentions religious fundamentalists who have been allowed to gain entry but here it serves the purpose of deconstructing the imagery we have from religious groups who consent to the idea of having people being treated like animals. In fact, in this society there seems to be no sense of identity anymore, they are all melted in to one, all visiting the same place Political refugees (...) conspirators, deposed monarchs, defeated factions, poets, [and] bandit chieftains (91). They have been homogenized by the hegemonic class. To increase the ironic tone the people in this short story have been deprived of what we, today, consider Civil Rights including the guarantee of peoples' physical and mental

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integrity, life and safety; protection from discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, ethnicity, religion, or disability; and individual rights such as privacy, the freedoms of thought and conscience, speech and expression, religion, the press, assembly and movement. All of these are absent in the short story because money ranks higher than these rights. If we were to think about this society from a Marxist point of view, the people oppressed are what he calls the proletariat and for the political economy, or in this case, the Auctioneers as representatives of the capitalist ideology, this social stratum have to be considered as nothing more than a worker () like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.(228). When we only consider people as work force or machines, we take away their humanity and, if we do it for a very long time that will be the only reality to exist, with no possibility of change or improvement. Suppression of rights and oppression is what every dictator in history has done in order to rule without impositions. Many of these dictators have done it for an ideology of hegemony, or to free a country from a corrupt system, or to avoid communism, and etc. All of them were led by a person; a face that inspired admiration or fear. The difference here is that the ruler does not have a face because is not a man, but capitalism. For that reason, I would argue that this story points out a grotesque capitalist society so that we, readers may reassess our own community. When we can only perceive the power of money and attempt to buy everything with it, we become less humane and allow preposterous situations to happen, such as the adoration to a pair of shoes or the frenzy for its auction because of its magical powers. Neither happiness nor love is something we can buy, because it is the result of happy relationships or good moments, even in times of sadness we are able to have them. Money is just paper and it does not guarantee that we will be happy or loved. In a way money is similar to the slippers: in a capitalist society, money is supposed to be the answer to our problems, our ticket back to a place where we can have a blissful life and tranquility, however it is just an illusion. We may feel powerful, unstoppable and may even be able to buy the most exclusive item, but that is just it, nothing more. Someday we will run out of things to buy and are left with what we truly are: alone with a pretty pair of slippers to remind us of our stupidity of thinking that we, once thought we could actually buy things that are (at the risk of sounding tacky) for free.