The Global Bidding for Dorothy Gale's Magical Shoes

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The Global Bidding for Dorothy Gale’s Magical Shoes — Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” as a (Self-)Reflection on the Post-Frontier Predicament

Justyna Deszcz–Tryhubczak

ALMAN RUSHDIE’S CONTINUING PREOCCUPATION with both Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and the MGM film The Wizard of Oz (1939) developed into the surrealistic short S 1 story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (1992). It is an amusing literary gloss on the actual auction of 1970, during which “a pair of ruby slippers, found in a bin in the MGM basement, were sold [to an anonymous bidder] [...] for the amazing sum of $15,000.”2 As Rushdie jocularly reflects, any of us could be the buyer who wishes “profoundly to possess, perhaps even to wear, Dorothy’s magic shoes. Was it dear reader, you? Was it I?” (46).3 In- deed, the profound fascination with Frank Baum’s story and its unquestion- able relevance to American sociopolitical milieux have generated what some critics define as the Oz cult or Oz myth, which has radiated a pervasive influence on both American and international audiences till today. Apparently, the magical shoes, idolized as one of the most universally revered embodiments of emancipation, individualism, democracy, and the much-coveted transgres- sion of an absurd and hostile reality, exude their magical aura also in Rush-

1 Some ideas presented in this article can be found in my book Rushdie in Wonderland: Fairytaleness in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004). 2 Salman Rushdie, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” in The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics; London: BFI, 1992): 46. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, 46. 106 JUSTYNA DESZCZ–TRYHUBCZAK «•» die’s postmodern Oz. No wonder that all present in the Grand Saleroom want at least to catch a glimpse of the slippers, and some even kiss their “trans- parent cage, setting off the […] alarm system [which] pumps a hundred thousand volts of electricity into the – lips of the glass kisser[s]” (58). In my reading of Rushdie’s tale, I intend to show how it reflects the uneasy frontierlessness of the globalized world and various lineaments of globalism when it has run wild: that is, when the ideals of economic integration, just dis- tribution of resources, cultural inclusiveness, and exuberant social and political exchange have all become a nightmarish delirium, actually serving the needs of unregulated global markets and capitalism. The story offers such a commentary through constituting (1) a warning against our dreams becoming marketable and thus turning into their opposites; and (2) a Jamesonian vision of the unavoidable postmodern all-pervasiveness of incongruent fictions, both of which impede the formation of an identity that responds to the full force of the post-frontier reality. Nevertheless, Rushdie’s text can also be seen as an encouragement to make the world more hospitable than his futuristic Oz: i.e. to resist the homogenizing neo-liberal ideology and commodification charac- teristic of contemporary global culture.4 As Rivkin and Ryan rightly point out, “culture comes from below and while it can be harnessed in profitable and ultimately socially conservative ways, it also represents the permanent possi- bility of eruption, of dissonance, and of an alternative imagination of reality.”5 Rushdie’s tale, narrated by an inhabitant of Oz who happens to be in love with Dorothy, can be regarded as a sequel to Baum’s cycle: the girl has grown up, whereas Oz has undergone a strange process of rationalization, for it is no longer as imaginary a realm as it once was. Oz’s inhabitants are strangely averse to forming new communal bonds and show exceptional reluctance to accept the infiltration of creatures from other unreal lands “into an already damaged reality” (61). The narrator is clearly panicked:

This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of the culture of the millennium […] Is the state employing insufficient violence? Should there be more rigorous controls? […] a

4 A similar reflection on the marketplace and its influence on culture and individual iden- tities is present in two of Rushdie’s recent novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). In both books, art (Vina and Ormus’s enterprise and Solanka’s Internet king- dom) is inevitably commercialized: i.e. their functioning is contingent on the culture indus- try. Still, disappointed and embittered as the characters are, they manage to maintain their spiritual and intellectual independence. Rushdie’s most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown (2005), although to some extent reliant on notions of cultural performance, is a more com- plex magical-realist political fable. 5 Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan, “Introduction: ‘The Politics of Culture’,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Rivkin & Ryan (Malden MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 1027.