The Cure for Guilty Memories

The Atlantic

3 days ago

If literature and pop culture are to be trusted, many of us are drawn to the idea of eliminating memories—cordoning them off, storing them outside ourselves, or getting rid of them completely. In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a former couple pays to have their memories of each other erased after a bad breakup. Jennifer Egan's 2022 novel, The Candy House, features a technology called Own Your Unconscious, which extracts and packages characters' memories to be revisited, or not, at will. And most recently, on the television show Severance, a corporation offers its employees a procedure that splits their consciousness in two, creating workers untroubled by their outside self's emotions. All of these narratives rely on the sense that memories—good and bad—are a burden. Implicitly, they ask their audience whether they'd like to be free of their recollections too.
Often, such stories suggest a real personal cost to getting rid of one's memories, and The Candy House and Severance both have broader dystopian elements as well. But the acclaimed short-story writer Karen Russell's second novel, The Antidote, takes a much more sweeping and historically minded approach to the idea of memory erasure and its pitfalls. Set during the Dust Bowl in a small Nebraska town called Uz, the book is named after a so-called prairie witch, one of a number of women in the area who perform a mysterious service: For a fee, they store memories for their drought-stricken neighbors, who whisper their secrets to the witches while they're in a trance. One of the Antidote's clients confesses to resenting their chronically ill child; others store beautiful memories 'like bouquets preserved under glass,' not wanting them to lose their bloom; still others, prodded by the town's corrupt sheriff, use her service to lock away details about crimes they've witnessed. Awake, the Antidote has no idea what she's heard. She operates, essentially, as temporary remote storage for the townspeople's recollections, making them inaccessible to anyone until the sharer chooses to retrieve the memory.
But the Antidote and her colleagues aren't the only memory-erasers in the novel. When a huge dust storm (the one known as Black Sunday, which, Woody Guthrie famously wrote, 'blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun') hits Uz, it somehow eliminates the Antidote's cache of memories. On realizing what has happened, she panics. Of course, this is an existential issue for her—prairie witching is how she supports herself—but her response also has a moral dimension: Although she doesn't know what secrets she's lost, she suspects that justice won't be done until many of them are aired publicly. But not even Black Sunday can erase Uz's founding shame: the theft of land from American Indians, and the devastation that ensued. One of Russell's narrators, a kindhearted farmer named Harp Oletsky, puts this bluntly to his peers, telling them that the 'land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to take care of it. Before we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings.'
Of course, to Harp, this uprooting, of which he is deeply ashamed, isn't history. His parents, Polish immigrants who fled German conquest and discrimination, took Indian land—and felt shame over doing so, having been uprooted themselves. But rather than changing course, they used prairie witches to get rid of their guilt toward the people whose homes they'd stolen.
The Antidote has her own complex relationship to this history. The daughter of poor, urban Italian immigrants, she tells herself that she and her family had nothing to do with the land theft—that, in fact, its wealthy perpetrators are her enemies too. But over the course of the novel, she comes to understand that her magic—her ability to bank ugly memories so that families such as the Oletskys can prosper without pain—is a form of complicity.
The Antidote comes to this realization as she befriends one of the novel's other narrators, a photographer named Cleo who comes to Nebraska through the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program designed to address rural poverty. On the road, Cleo buys a camera that seems to be able to see through time. Its images, once developed, show the future or past of the site Cleo meant to photograph. Often, she can tell she's looking at a time other than her own, but can't begin to guess when it is.
By collapsing time, Russell yanks her audience into the book. Cleo may not recognize the 21st century when she develops a picture of it, but we do. Some of the novel's agenda—it very much has an agenda—is to create a history of the prairie that, in the Antidote's words, is one not 'of Manifest Destiny, but Invisible Loss.' Russell clearly wants to complicate John Steinbeck–type tales of the Dust Bowl, ones that tend to concentrate on white farmers' suffering without considering the pain their arrival in the West caused. For Americans to forget the latter, Russell seems to argue, would be a loss of identity on a national scale—something worth grieving and, indeed, something dystopian. But The Antidote doesn't stop there. Its true project is to defeat the very fantasy it starts with: that of getting rid of the past. In the novel, memories, like money, need to be kept in circulation for the health of society. They don't do anybody much good in a vault.
The Antidote 's characters tend to struggle with describing their memories to anyone but the Antidote—and to the reader. Russell writes in what can feel like a series of monologues. As in her first novel, the highly inventive and fun Swamplandia!, her prose is just dense and unusual enough to insist on being read slowly. At the same time, it's direct and intimate. Especially in the first half of the novel, her narrators seem to be pouring their guts out to us in order to avoid talking to one another. Harp, who is raising his orphaned niece, Dell, after her mother is murdered, never reminisces with Dell about his sister; the Antidote and Cleo both do their best not to have meaningful conversations with anyone at all. Only when Russell puts these four characters into proximity do they start getting some of their memories out into the air.
For Dell, Harp, and the Antidote, talking is straightforwardly healing. Dell and Harp get to grieve Dell's mom; Harp gets to work through his unsettled feelings about his family's acquisition of its land; the Antidote gets to reckon with the nature of her work. For Cleo, the book's outsider, however, things are more complex. Her explicit duty as a government photographer is to contribute to 'public recollection, 'a rich fund of memories' for every present and future American,' but even before her camera begins showing her scenes that aren't there, she has little faith in the veracity of photography. As an artist, she knows that she can manipulate the images she makes: 'People are wary of my camera,' she admits, 'with good reason. Each flash ran a stake through your heart. Now you were nailed to one spot, wearing this forlorn or broken expression. The wrinkling ocean of human thinking and feeling that ripples across a face, over a lifetime—the camera cannot capture any of that.'
In fact, it's Cleo's assignment to catch her subjects looking pitiable, though without letting them know she's doing so. Her images are meant not only to become memory but also to get Congress to give struggling farmers money. For Cleo, who is Black, this is a fraught mission; she knows—and her boss often reminds her—that it is likeliest to succeed if she makes portraits of the 'faces that carried the most weight with Congress. The need that triggered avalanches of compassion was White need.' Russell includes real images from the Resettlement Administration in her book—the sorts of images that were by and large taken to represent white suffering, even when, as in the case of Dorothea Lange's famous ' Migrant Mother,' their subject was not white. Their presence is a reminder that public memory can hide as much as it preserves.
The Antidote, in part, is a reaction to the hidden history of the Dust Bowl, an effort to return to circulation the fact that the land 'blew away,' as Harp puts it, because white settlers stole it from its stewards. By the end of the novel, Russell's characters are all on a mission to get people talking not only about this painful collective memory but also about all the bits of their past that they've tried to stifle or pack away. The more we share our memories, they realize, the less they burden us—and, crucially, the more we can know ourselves through them. This is especially true for Dell: As she begins to allow herself to talk about her mother, whom she misses acutely, she grows more able to feel happiness in her new life with Harp.
Russell makes this point about memory in other ways too—through an exhibition of Cleo's photographs and a subplot concerning Uz's sheriff, who is both the Antidote's enemy and one of her biggest clients. Sometimes he deposits his own memories with her; more often, though, he uses her to hide evidence, hence her moral distress after Black Sunday. If the happy memories some people deposit in the Antidote's vaults are treasures, then so, in a sense, are the ones that could have brought justice. Taken together, these lost stories demonstrate that in The Antidote, hiding memories—whatever the reason—is never a good thing. The poor farmer who deposited his first kiss in the prairie witch loses it forever on Black Sunday. Dell, meanwhile, loses her chance at knowing who killed her mother, due to the sheriff's machinations. These are very different losses, but both suggest a cost in refusing to engage with the past. If a person or a group of people can't look back on the ills they've perpetrated, they can't undo their damage or aspire to do better in the future. And if they can't summon the joys of their life—well, then what's there to hope for?