No Place Like "Home"

We are all crazy in one sense or another.  Every one of us has out little quirks that make us who we are, and without them, the world would be bland and boring.  It would be like eating white rice for every meal.  No change, nothing to spice things up.  And this is why a certain level of craziness is embraced.  I’m not talking about crazy like the guy on the street corner shouting at cars or some wild mathematician who likes to mail out bombs from his rural Montana shack.  I’m speaking of the guys that dress like Elvis for a living, or the people who have collections of whatever big enough that they need a warehouse.  It is these “crazies” that we need as a society.  They are the ones that make things interesting.  And even in the literature that we read, we want to know that the people in it are not going to be standing at a street corner shouting at cars.

In Salmon Rushdie’s short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” the scene is laid out of a world that has almost gone mad.  To me, it seems “Clockwork Orange” kind of crazy.  And at this auction for the slippers worn in “The Wizard of Oz” everybody who is anybody in this wacko place is there.  But the narrator must distance himself from this bunch for the reader’s sake.  We want to know that he does not want the slippers for the purpose of walking around his house in just said footwhear clicking his heels and hoping that he will be taken to some far off land, away from the Oz that he is living in.  This reassurance of sanity comes in the form of his recollection of his relationship with his former wife (and cousin, which I won’t say anything about) and why he even wants the slippers in the first place.

When he goes into his recollection of his former lover he speaks of her rather thunderous lovemaking habits.  Saying that “She chose to cry out at the moment of penetration:  ‘Home, boy!  Home, baby, yes – you’ve come home!’”(Rushdie, p. 95)  He calls her the love of his life.  His sole reason for buying the slippers is to get her back.  And if you have ever been in love, you can identify with this type of craziness.   When one can identify with the protagonists reasoning not matter how crazy, it makes the story that much valid to our point of view.  This is what I think the mention of his former wife and Cousin Gale was for.

So it is our craziness’ that brings us together as a society.  It is what helps make people who like to dress up in “Star Wars” garb seem not insane, because they do it as a bunch.  And this is why Rushdie included the character of Gale in “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.”  Or it could be that it makes for a great metaphor of the slippers being able to bring him “home” as Gale so loudly cries.