The function of signature in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Mitchell Owens

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).