In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From Wonder to Disappointment:A Typewriter’s (Crashing) Value and the Limits of Discourse in Los de abajo
  • Mario Bahena Uriostegui (bio)

In his novel Los de abajo (1915), Mariano Azuela explores the limits of value-granting discourses in the rapid depreciation of a typewriter among Mexican revolutionaries. After a failed military engagement, the revolutionaries retreat from the city of Zacatecas laden with pillaged possessions. As they advance into the countryside, the original attractiveness of their loot wanes. In this vignette, the price of the typewriter plummets at an alarming rate as the revolutionaries become incapable of granting any value to it. This devaluation of the typewriter peaks with an unexpected—and perhaps cathartic—effort to destroy contemporary technology:

—¿Quién me merca esta maquinaria?—pregonaba uno, enrojecido y fatigado de llevar la carga de su “avance”. Era una máquina de escribir nueva, que a todos atrajo con los deslumbrantes reflejos del niquelado.

La “Oliver”, en una sola mañana, había tenido cinco propietarios, comenzando por valer diez pesos, depreciándose uno o dos a cada cambio de dueño. La verdad era que pesaba demasiado y nadie podía soportarla más de media hora.

—Doy peseta por ella—ofreció la Codorniz.

—Es tuya—respondió el dueño dándosela prontamente y con temores ostensibles de que aquél se arrepintiera. [End Page 77]

La Codorniz, por veinticinco centavos, tuvo el gusto de tomarla en sus manos y de arrojarla luego contra las piedras, donde se rompió ruidosamente.

(136–37)

[“Who’ll buy this machine from me?,” asked one, overheated and fatigued from carrying his loot. It was a new typewriter, which fascinated all of them with the dazzling gleam of the nickel trimming.

In the course of only one morning, the Oliver had had five owners. Its price had begun at ten pesos and had depreciated by one or two pesos with each change of hands. As a matter of fact it was excessively heavy and no one could carry it more than half an hour.

“I’ll give you a peseta for it,” offered Codorniz.

“It’s yours,” responded the owner, giving it to him promptly, evidently fearful that he would change his mind.

For twenty-five centavos Codorniz had the pleasure of taking it in his hands and then dashing it against the stones where it broke up with a great clatter.

(Ruffineli 206)]

The last buyer, Codorniz, pays 25 cents, far less than the original price of 10 pesos. He purchases it only to have the opportunity to smash it on the road for everyone to see, which overtly symbolizes the typewriter’s dropping value. He makes this spectacle to convey a message: any heavy object from the city—regardless of its attractiveness or potential service—does not have a place among itinerant revolutionaries. In this paradoxical turn of events, the contemporary facilitator of communication becomes the medium that expresses its last message in an unwritten—yet clearly understandable—formula. [End Page 78]

Objects of Discourse

This price drop represents the failure to create a unified national consciousness regarding the advantages of technology in Mexican society during the last decades of the rule of Porfirio Díaz. Societies develop a complex relationship with objects (technological or not) mediated by discourses that emphasize the useful of objects over their disadvantages. In her book Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics, Roberta Sassatelli states, “In all societies objects accompany human beings throughout their existence, offering them support and inspiration and, at the same time, imposing limits and difficulties” (1). The intricate duality of “support and inspiration” versus “limits and difficulties” is normalized due to imported or homegrown discourses that highlight the former features while justifying the latter characteristics. That is, an object is always accompanied by an understanding of its functions that vindicates its burdens. Without this discourse of the object’s role within a given society, the object—technological or otherwise—is meaningless. In the vignette from Los de abajo, the revolutionaries bring the typewriter along without any accompanying discourse to explain how it could support them, thereby justifying the burden of carrying it. As a result, the typewriter does not have any other value...

pdf

Share