‘The Antidote’ to Guilty Memories

If literature and popular culture are to be trusted, many people are drawn to the concept of eliminating recollections—cordoning them off, storing them outdoors ourselves, or eliminating them fully. Within the 2004 film Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts, a former couple pays to have their recollections of one another erased after a foul breakup. Jennifer Egan’s 2022 novel, The Sweet Home, includes a know-how referred to as Personal Your Unconscious, which extracts and packages characters’ recollections to be revisited, or not, at will. And most just lately, on the tv present Severance, a company affords its staff a process that splits their consciousness in two, creating staff untroubled by their outdoors self’s feelings. All of those narratives depend on the sense that recollections—good and unhealthy—are a burden. Implicitly, they ask their viewers whether or not they’d wish to be freed from their recollections too.Typically, such tales recommend an actual private value to eliminating one’s recollections, and The Sweet Home and Severance each have broader dystopian components as properly. However the acclaimed short-story author Karen Russell’s second novel, The Antidote, takes a way more sweeping and traditionally minded strategy to the concept of reminiscence erasure and its pitfalls. Set through the Mud Bowl in a small Nebraska city referred to as Uz, the e book is called after a so-called prairie witch, certainly one of quite a few ladies within the space who carry out a mysterious service: For a payment, they retailer recollections for his or her drought-stricken neighbors, who whisper their secrets and techniques to the witches whereas they’re in a trance. One of many Antidote’s purchasers confesses to resenting their chronically unwell little one; others retailer lovely recollections “like bouquets preserved below glass,” not wanting them to lose their bloom; nonetheless others, prodded by the city’s corrupt sheriff, use her service to lock away particulars about crimes they’ve witnessed. Awake, the Antidote has no thought what she’s heard. She operates, basically, as momentary distant storage for the townspeople’s recollections, making them inaccessible to anybody till the sharer chooses to retrieve the reminiscence.However the Antidote and her colleagues aren’t the one memory-erasers within the novel. When an enormous mud storm (the one referred to as Black Sunday, which, Woody Guthrie famously wrote, “blocked out the visitors an’ blocked out the solar”) hits Uz, it by some means eliminates the Antidote’s cache of recollections. On realizing what has occurred, she panics. After all, that is an existential concern for her—prairie witching is how she helps herself—however her response additionally has an ethical dimension: Though she doesn’t know what secrets and techniques she’s misplaced, she suspects that justice received’t be finished till a lot of them are aired publicly. However not even Black Sunday can erase Uz’s founding disgrace: the theft of land from American Indians, and the devastation that ensued. One in all Russell’s narrators, a kindhearted farmer named Harp Oletsky, places this bluntly to his friends, telling them that the “land is blowing as a result of we stole it from the individuals who knew find out how to handle it. Earlier than we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings.”After all, to Harp, this uprooting, of which he’s deeply ashamed, isn’t historical past. His mother and father, Polish immigrants who fled German conquest and discrimination, took Indian land—and felt disgrace over doing so, having been uprooted themselves. However somewhat than altering course, they used prairie witches to eliminate their guilt towards the folks whose houses they’d stolen.The Antidote has her personal complicated relationship to this historical past. The daughter of poor, city Italian immigrants, she tells herself that she and her household had nothing to do with the land theft—that, the truth is, its rich perpetrators are her enemies too. However over the course of the novel, she comes to grasp that her magic—her capacity to financial institution ugly recollections in order that households such because the Oletskys can prosper with out ache—is a type of complicity.Learn: The girl who can be SteinbeckThe Antidote involves this realization as she befriends one of many novel’s different narrators, a photographer named Cleo who involves Nebraska by way of the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program designed to handle rural poverty. On the highway, Cleo buys a digital camera that appears to have the ability to see by way of time. Its photographs, as soon as developed, present the longer term or previous of the location Cleo meant to {photograph}. Typically, she will be able to inform she’s a time apart from her personal, however can’t start to guess when it’s.By collapsing time, Russell yanks her viewers into the e book. Cleo might not acknowledge the twenty first century when she develops an image of it, however we do. A few of the novel’s agenda—it very a lot has an agenda—is to create a historical past of the prairie that, within the Antidote’s phrases, is one not “of Manifest Future, however Invisible Loss.” Russell clearly needs to complicate John Steinbeck–sort tales of the Mud Bowl, ones that have a tendency to focus on white farmers’ struggling with out contemplating the ache their arrival within the West brought about. For Individuals to overlook the latter, Russell appears to argue, can be a lack of identification on a nationwide scale—one thing price grieving and, certainly, one thing dystopian. However The Antidote doesn’t cease there. Its true mission is to defeat the very fantasy it begins with: that of eliminating the previous. Within the novel, recollections, like cash, must be saved in circulation for the well being of society. They don’t do anyone a lot good in a vault.The Antidote’s characters are inclined to battle with describing their recollections to anybody however the Antidote—and to the reader. Russell writes in what can really feel like a collection of monologues. As in her first novel, the extremely creative and enjoyable Swamplandia!, her prose is simply dense and strange sufficient to insist on being learn slowly. On the similar time, it’s direct and intimate. Particularly within the first half of the novel, her narrators appear to be pouring their guts out to us with the intention to keep away from speaking to 1 one other. Harp, who’s elevating his orphaned niece, Dell, after her mom is murdered, by no means reminisces with Dell about his sister; the Antidote and Cleo each do their finest to not have significant conversations with anybody in any respect. Solely when Russell places these 4 characters into proximity do they begin getting a few of their recollections out into the air.For Dell, Harp, and the Antidote, speaking is straightforwardly therapeutic. Dell and Harp get to grieve Dell’s mother; Harp will get to work by way of his unsettled emotions about his household’s acquisition of its land; the Antidote will get to reckon with the character of her work. For Cleo, the e book’s outsider, nevertheless, issues are extra complicated. Her express obligation as a authorities photographer is to contribute to “public recollection, ‘a wealthy fund of recollections’ for each current and future American,” however even earlier than her digital camera begins exhibiting her scenes that aren’t there, she has little religion within the veracity of pictures. As an artist, she is aware of that she will be able to manipulate the pictures she makes: “Persons are cautious of my digital camera,” she admits, “with good cause. Every flash ran a stake by way of your coronary heart. Now you have been nailed to 1 spot, carrying this forlorn or damaged expression. The wrinkling ocean of human pondering and feeling that ripples throughout a face, over a lifetime—the digital camera can not seize any of that.”Learn: Whitewashing the Nice DepressionIn reality, it’s Cleo’s task to catch her topics trying pitiable, although with out letting them know she’s doing so. Her photographs are meant not solely to change into reminiscence but in addition to get Congress to offer struggling farmers cash. For Cleo, who’s Black, this can be a fraught mission; she is aware of—and her boss usually reminds her—that it’s likeliest to succeed if she makes portraits of the “faces that carried probably the most weight with Congress. The necessity that triggered avalanches of compassion was White want.” Russell contains actual photographs from the Resettlement Administration in her e book—the types of photographs that have been by and enormous taken to signify white struggling, even when, as within the case of Dorothea Lange’s well-known “Migrant Mom,” their topic was not white. Their presence is a reminder that public reminiscence can disguise as a lot because it preserves.The Antidote, partly, is a response to the hidden historical past of the Mud Bowl, an effort to return to circulation the truth that the land “blew away,” as Harp places it, as a result of white settlers stole it from its stewards. By the top of the novel, Russell’s characters are all on a mission to get folks speaking not solely about this painful collective reminiscence but in addition about all of the bits of their previous that they’ve tried to stifle or pack away. The extra we share our recollections, they understand, the much less they burden us—and, crucially, the extra we will know ourselves by way of them. That is very true for Dell: As she begins to permit herself to speak about her mom, whom she misses acutely, she grows extra in a position to really feel happiness in her new life with Harp.Russell makes this level about reminiscence in different methods too—by way of an exhibition of Cleo’s pictures and a subplot regarding Uz’s sheriff, who’s each the Antidote’s enemy and certainly one of her greatest purchasers. Generally he deposits his personal recollections along with her; extra usually, although, he makes use of her to cover proof, therefore her ethical misery after Black Sunday. If the pleased recollections some folks deposit within the Antidote’s vaults are treasures, then so, in a way, are those that might have introduced justice. Taken collectively, these misplaced tales show that in The Antidote, hiding recollections—regardless of the cause—is rarely a great factor. The poor farmer who deposited his first kiss within the prairie witch loses it endlessly on Black Sunday. Dell, in the meantime, loses her likelihood at figuring out who killed her mom, because of the sheriff’s machinations. These are very completely different losses, however each recommend a value in refusing to interact with the previous. If an individual or a bunch of individuals can’t look again on the ills they’ve perpetrated, they will’t undo their injury or aspire to do higher sooner or later. And if they will’t summon the fun of their life—properly, then what’s there to hope for?​While you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.