“What does the word refer to,” she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, “does it really signify anything at all?” But it’s not that meaning is absent rather, it is hidden in layers of signification. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations.
Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has.
In Leena Krohn’s novella “Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone,” the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. “Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction” is the most extensive English translation yet of work by the celebrated Finnish writer.
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