Fantasy and Reality

            This weekend I went and saw the new movie Iron Man.  After the movie I fantasized what it would be like to fly around in a suit.  What if tomorrow there was an auction selling an actual fully functional iron man suit.  What if the fantasies of stories and movies were real?  What would people do to acquire their fantasies?

            In the short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” by Salman Rushdie, the reader is immersed into a setting where fantasy and reality exist together.  The ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz are real, they have magical powers, and are being sold at an auction.  In this saleroom anything and everything is auctioned.  Things are auctioned like the “Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx,” and practically anything imaginable is auctioned in this saleroom.

            The narrator of the story is a man with the intention of buying the ruby slippers to win back the love of his life, his cousin.  He describes the setting and the wide variety of characters who have arrived to admire the ruby slippers.  He tells how people are literally drooling while looking at the slippers and the janitor his having to mop up everyone’s drool. 

            When the auction begins the narrator has every intention to acquire the ruby slippers.  During the auction there are explosions followed by sirens but people don’t move in the saleroom because the suspense is so great with the ruby slippers.  When he gets to the point when the only people who are still bidding are him and “disembodied heads on video screens, and unheard voices on telephone links,” he finally realizes that the love of his cousin Gale isn’t worth the amount of money he was about to spend (pg.101).  The narrator then says, “my cousin Gale looses her hold on me in the crucible of the auction, I feel refreshed and free” (pg.102).

            The whole episode involving the narrators cousin Gale had a large purpose in the story.  The narrator was trying to buy the slippers only for her love. 

The story seems to me as one you could expect from a man like Rushdie, who at the time was confined to his hiding space under the “fatwa.”  His only connection to the world could have been with movies and what he sees on television.  Which to me explains why there are so many fictional movie characters in his story.