Sometimes a man says things he don't mean.

(O'Connor 127)

In her fatal encounter with The Misfit, the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” confronts a particularly lethal manifestation of her changing social order. Throughout her life, this woman has been struggling with the shift from the ante-bellum values of lineage and gentility to those of a cash-oriented culture, and with the implications this shift has for the assumptions that underwrite her vanishing system of beliefs. While she does not accept or even fully comprehend these implications, in her behavior she acknowledges them and attempts some adjustment. The grandmother's handling of signatures, while clearly demonstrating the tension involved in this ongoing negotiation of adaptation and denial, also indicates that her difficulties arc related to her failure to recognize fully the arbitrariness of the sign. The story she tells of Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden and his edible initials illustrates this failure. Moreover, The Misfit's subsequent discussion of signature, coupled with his threat of murder, cause the grandmother to repeat this error; she retreats back into the assumptions whose erosion she has been attempting to deny, but these assumptions, which have been dismantled throughout the story, offer her no protection from her killer.

The grandmother's value system is founded upon particular notions of aristocracy and heredity. According to this system, there is a specific, superior class of people, the gentility, in which one can locate certain finer qualities. This class and its attributes cannot be separated from each other by a change in outward appearances, even one as severe as the Confederacy's crippling defeat in the Civil War: these qualities are fixed in the blood and are passed directly from one generation to the next. A certain social order follows from the assumption that blood is the guarantor of worth, an order in which ladies are treated as ladies, gentlemen behave as gentlemen, and those of less fortunate lineage remain in their appropriate, subordinate places.

By attaching such great importance to heredity, this social structure reflects a logocentric foundation. According to the structure, the gentility possess certain admirable qualities, and these qualities have a point of origin: presumably, God's bestowal of them. Through blood, these attributes have been communicated, directly and without any deterioration of the original signal, through the many generations that have followed from this starting point. The accuracy and reliability of this communication are guaranteed by the one-to-one relation that exists between the information being transmitted and the mechanism of that transmission. The blood that carries value is comprised of that value: blood and worth are one.

This connection is echoed and supported by a similar relationship, the one-to-one signifier/signified correlation upon which the logocentric viewpoint rests. just as blood has carried forward the superior qualities of the southern aristocracy, so too has language: the logocentric linkage of signifier and signified sustains an identically direct line back to the Word with which God created the aristocracy. A southern gentlemen is therefore as good as his word, because his word is as good as his blood; his blood is his worth, and that worth is the Word.

The logocentric relationship of word and worth is reflected in the grandmother's approach to her environment. In her efforts to preserve the values of an aristocratic tradition, she devotes as much attention to the maintenance of that tradition's outward signs as she does to its less visible aspects. She is very conscious throughout the story of what people are wearing, because to her it is through such things as clothing that one can externally reflect internal worth, even when this worth is otherwise obscured by surrounding conditions. While her son Bailey chooses an alarmingly loud, parrot-patterned shirt for the family outing, and while her déclassé daughter-in-law remains in slacks for the duration of the trip, the grandmother wears an elaborately cuffed and collared dress, so that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (118). The clothes make the woman: to the grandmother, sign and signified seem one and the same.

No outfit, no matter how carefully chosen, could provide an adequate line of defense against the drastic shift occurring within the grandmother's culture. The terms of the grandmother's value system are being rapidly undercut by a mercantile order in which blood is displaced by money. The worth transmitted by the sign of the dollar differs greatly from the value transmitted by the sign of the breed, and in the grandmother's eyes it is vastly inferior. Within this new mercantile world, women think nothing of wearing slacks in public, children feel free to openly malign their native states, and honest-looking young men can somehow bring themselves to defraud unsuspecting gas station proprietors. There seems to be no place in this system for the polite behavior of gentlemen and ladies; there seems tO be no place for the grandmother.

The link between the ascendancy of the mercantile and the decline of gentility is demonstrated most clearly by June Star, the granddaughter who combines appalling rudeness with an obvious cash fixation. The insults she thoughtlessly delivers to her grandmother and to Red Sammy's wife focus on money, specifically on the power of “a million bucks.” Even this great amount, she accusingly says, could not curtail her grandmother's busybody impulses (118), nor could it persuade June Star to accept a joking invitation to move into “a broken down place” (121) like Red Sammy's.

If the ante-bellum system of values were actually underwritten by all that it presupposes, then blood would retain its primacy, money would remain subordinate to breed, and June Star would not be so rude. The dollar's sign appears much later in the chain of signification than does the sign of blood, which is linked much more dearly and directly to the point of origin in God's Word, and which should therefore infuse money with the value found at this originating point. The clearly evidenced failure of blood to assert its worth over the opposing system of cash value exposes the invalidity of the bloodworth connection, and of the logocentric assumptions through which this connection is made.

Despite the evidence, the grandmother fights on behalf of blood: she dresses like a lady, she rebukes rudeness wherever she sees it, and she looks benignly down upon the quaint “piccaninnies” who sit at the bottom of her social ladder. Much of her battle for blood, however, is fought on money's terms, in monetary territory. Simply to convince her family that Georgia architectural heritage is worthy of some consideration, she dangles before them the false prospect of hidden treasure (and, in a revealing error of information transmission, she gets her states wrong). A more telling and complex example of the grandmother's concession to cash values can be found in the story she tells of Edgar Atkins Teagarden and his many watermelons.

In this story, which she tells to calm her squabbling grandchildren, the grandmother harks back, perhaps falsely, to her days as “a maiden lady.” During this period, a gentleman suitor, Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden, brings to her each Saturday a fresh watermelon inscribed with his initials, E.A.T. One weekend, when the grandmother is absent, a “rigger boy” misconstrues the intention behind these letters, takes them as instruction, and consumes that day's offering (120). This misreading is highly significant, and so too is the grandmother's acknowledgment that such a misreading can occur.

Jacques Derrida notes in the concluding section of “Signature Event Context” that, while the absence of the signer is by definition an implication of the written signature, the signature nevertheless

marks and retains [the] having-been-present [of the signer] in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore a now in general, in the transcendental form of nowness.

(107)

The proper maintenance of this transcendental nowness requires an “attachment” of the signature to the signing “source,” and for this to happen “the absolute singularity of an event of the signature and of a form of a signature must be retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event” (107).

The purity of this singular event depends upon a direct correspondence of signifier and signified, but the grandmother's tale dismantles this link; this ostensibly simple story of a misread fruit exposes the arbitrariness of the sign. Outside of a context in which the intention behind their inscription is known, the letters E.A.T. are read in a manner drastically different from that which is planned by their signer. The signature does not carry the signer or the signer's intentions within it in some essential way, because there cannot be a pure attachment of sign to source: with the innocent eating of watermelon, the assumptions of logocentrism are exploded.

With the exposure of signature she achieves here, the grandmother unwittingly undermines her own position. This effect is furthered by the story's postscript, an addendum she offers in an effort to tailor her tale to the cash-based values of her audience. June Star is not impressed by Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden: to someone fixated on the amount of a million dollars, a monogrammed watermelon makes quite a meager gift. The grandmother responds to this criticism first by reiterating Teagarden's status as a gentleman, and then by observing that Teagarden “had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man” (120). If this is meant as a demonstration of money's proper subordination to aristocratic blood, the example falls back on itself, because in this case mercantile power underwrites the hereditary attributes it should instead simply reflect. The gentleman's signature, the custodian of the individual's worth in the perpetual now, is shown as ineffective and arbitrary through its easy displacement by a more obviously arbitrary signature, the corporate trademark of the Coca-Cola Company.

With this story and her other actions, the grandmother performs an intricate, reluctant dance: she both struggles against and concedes to the demands of a changing cultural order. When she meets The Misfit, the performance becomes even more difficult. The Misfit's statements and actions take to a much more blatant extreme that which is hinted at by the grandmother's behavior; faced with this extremity, the grandmother temporarily retreats from what it dearly suggests.

The Misfit explains his deviant, barbarous behavior in terms of the epistemological uncertainty engendered by logocentric collapse. His focus is the story of Jesus Christ and the raising of Lazarus. If, The Misfit observes, this event actually occurred, one should follow Jesus; if, however, it did not happen, “then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him” (132). The difficulty is that one can never know, because the signifiers through which such information must be transmitted are detached even from so conspicuously divine a source as Jesus Christ; the word will not carry the Word. One can be sure only of events one has witnessed: as The Misfit observes, “… if I had been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now” (132).

Faced with this problem, The Misfit offers a solution whose radical terms point clearly to the arbitrariness of the sign; it is the clarity of these terms that accelerates the grandmother's short-lived and unsuccessful retreat. For The Misfit, the injustice of his treatment by society rests in the imbalance between his dimly recollected crimes and the harsh sentences meted out for them: “… I call myself The Misfit … because I can't make what all I done wrong fit with all I gone through in punishment” (131). Those who decide upon these punishments feel justified in allotting them because they possess signed documents attesting to the evil he has done. The Misfit, however, refuses to recognize the power of any signature other than his own:

“… they never shown me [the incriminating] papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right …”

(131)

A signature's function is to retain the having-been-present of the signer in the transcendental now. As the tale of the watermelon indicates, however, the efficacy of this retention depends upon the receiver's knowledge of the signing's context; according to The Misfit, the only people who can accurately know the context of signatures are the signers themselves. In the contextually contingent realm of the arbitrary sign, the only intentions one can know are one's own, and the only person with whom one can accurately communicate is one's self. With no originating Word underwriting any particular value, The Misfit's morality of meanness and the southern aristocracy's code of civilized conduct can be seen as equally valid: that is, as equally arbitrary.

It is the grandmother and her family who suffer the implications of this position; the position, in effect, kills them. Attempting to stave off her violent death, the grandmother resorts to the values of gentility, the very terms The Misfit has just denied:

“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady …”

(132)

This retreat is unsuccessful because the structure to which the grandmother turns for shelter has been dismantled by that from which she flees: the assumptions that give validity to the value of blood have been pulled out from under her.

Recognizing that her shaken beliefs will not sway The Misfit, the grandmother turns to the mercantile values that have displaced those beliefs: she offers The Misfit money. The Misfit, however, realizes that the dollar sign is just as arbitrary as the sign of blood, and the offer has no effect on him. The grandmother has been divided between two opposing structures, and now both structures have collapsed.

The grandmother ends her life with a desperate effort to re-inscribe that which has been lost in this double collapse. In this attempt she experiences one last manifestation of the arbitrariness of the sign, by undergoing a final confusion of signifiers. The Misfit has by this time had Bailey shot, and has donned Bailey's colorful shirt. The grandmother is reminded by the shirt of something she cannot name (130); the sign fails to communicate the information it should. The sign fails, and then it misfires: in the moment before her death, the grandmother sees The Misfit as “one of [her] babies,” as “one of [her] own children” (132). The concept of familial linkage has become attached to the signifier-shirt by Bailey's wearing of it. When The Misfit wears the shirt, the grandmother sees this notion transmit and connect itself to The Misfit. She fails in this final moment to recognize the arbitrariness of this attachment, and it is from this that The Misfit recoils when he steps back to shoot her.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” A Derrida Reader. Ed. P. Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 82-111.

O'Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. New York: Noonday, 1971. 117-33.