jimson+weed

Benjy's interactions with jimson weed are scattered throughout //TSAF -// he is constantly clutching it. If "Caddie smelled like trees," then the smell of jimson weed is what is left after she departs - the scent of a fallen world. Jimson weed is a kind of nightshade, a poisonous plant with a series of satanic names, including devil's snare, devil's trumpet, devil's weed, and devil's cucumber (more prosaically, it is also known as thornapple and stink weed).

As a member of the nightshade family, jimson weed is linked to a prestigious literary, biblical, and cultural history; it is part of the same family as belladonna and mandrake root, tying it to Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, and more. In Faulkner, the very name "jimson weed" renders this history almost irrelevant, insisting that this plant is a mere weed.

The name "jimson weed" is a bastardization of "Jamestown weed," so named after an incident in which British soldiers, who, while trying to suppress Bacon's Rebellion at Jamestown in 1676, spent eleven days hallucinating after having accidentally consumed it (...nor were they the last to do so). (Perhaps it is appropriate that Benjy's own stream-of-consciousness narrative itself often has a hallucinatory quality to it.) On the one hand, then, Jimson weed is a native and potentially dangerous vegetation, with a notable footnote in both literary history and American ecological history. On the other, it is a proliferating weed. The contrast between an elite-but-past history and present-day fallenness drives much of //The Sound and the Fury,// and this postlapsarian dynamic is repeated in the very weed that Benjy carries around and obsesses over.

//What are you moaning after, Luster said. You can watch them again when we get to the branch. Here. Here's you a jimson weed. He gave me the flower.// (TSAF 6)

//Luster knocked the flowers over with his hand. "That's what they'll do to you at Jackson when you starts bellering."// //I tried to pick up the flowers. Luster picked them up, and they went away. I began to cry.// //"Beller." Luster said. "Beller. You want something to beller about. All right, then. Caddy." He whispered. "Caddy. Beller now. Caddy."// //"Luster." Dilsey said from the kitchen.// //The flowers came back.// (TSAF 55)

TSAF 6, 50, 54 55, 56 (and more) [Katie Montgomery\