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.
如果要信任文学和流行文化，我们中的许多人都会吸引消除记忆的想法 - 将它们拒之门外，将它们存放在自己外面或完全摆脱它们。在2004年的电影《永恒的阳光》中，一对前夫妇付出了代价，以使他们对彼此的回忆彼此夺走后，在糟糕的分手之后被抹去了。詹妮弗·埃根（Jennifer Egan）的2022年小说《糖果屋》（The Candy House）采用了一种称为“您的昏迷”的技术，该技术会随意提取和包装角色的记忆，无论是否随意重新审视。最近，在电视节目《遣散》中，一家公司为员工提供了一个程序，将意识分为一分为二，从而使工人不受外部自我的情绪的困扰。所有这些叙述都依赖于记忆（美好而坏）的感觉。隐含地，他们询问听众是否也想摆脱回忆。
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.
通常，这样的故事表明，摆脱一个人的记忆的实际成本是真正的成本，而糖果屋和遣散费也具有更广泛的反乌托邦元素。但是，著名的短篇小说作家凯伦·罗素（Karen Russell）的第二本小说《解毒剂》采用了一种更加清晰，历史上雄心勃勃的方法来探索记忆擦除及其陷阱的想法。这本书是在内布拉斯加州一个名为UZ的小镇的尘土碗期间，以所谓的草原女巫的名字命名，是该地区的许多女性之一，她们的一项神秘服务：收费，他们为他们的干旱陷入困境的邻居存储了记忆，她们在妇女的秘密时对巫婆窃窃私语。解毒剂的一位客户承认，对他们的慢性病孩子感到不满。其他人则存储美丽的回忆“像玻璃下的花束一样，不希望他们失去盛开；还有其他人受到该镇腐败的警长的影响，他用她的服务锁定了他们目睹的有关犯罪的细节。醒来，解毒剂不知道她听到了什么。从本质上讲，她作为城镇居民的回忆的临时远程存储空间，使任何人都无法访问，直到共享者选择检索记忆为止。
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.”
但是解毒剂和她的同事并不是小说中唯一的记忆狂。当一场巨大的沙尘暴（一个被称为黑色星期日的一场暴风雨，伍迪·古斯里（Woody Guthrie）著名地写道：“阻止了交通，挡住了太阳”）击中了乌兹，它以某种方式消除了解毒剂的记忆。在意识到发生了什么事时，她惊慌失措。当然，这对她来说是一个生存问题 - 巫婆巫婆是她的支持方式 - 但她的回应也有道德上的层面：尽管她不知道自己失去了什么秘密，但她怀疑直到许多人公开播出，她才能做到正义。但是，即使是黑色的星期日也无法消除乌兹的成立耻辱：美国印第安人盗窃土地，以及随之而来的破坏。罗素的叙述者之一，一个善良的农民，名叫Harp Oletsky，他直言不讳地将其放在他的同龄人身上，告诉他们“土地在吹来，因为我们从知道如何照顾它的人那里偷走了它。在我们拔起草原之前，我们将人类拔起人的人。”
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.
当然，对于竖琴而言，这种连根拔起的叛乱，他深深地感到羞耻的不是历史。他的父母，逃离德国征服和歧视的波兰移民夺走了印度的土地，并为此而感到羞耻，被连根拔起。但是，他们没有改变路线，而是利用草原女巫摆脱了他们被盗房屋的人的内gui感。
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.
解毒剂与这一历史有自己的复杂关系。她是贫穷的城市意大利移民的女儿，她告诉自己，她和她的家人与盗窃土地无关 - 实际上，其富裕的肇事者也是她的敌人。但是在小说的过程中，她开始了解自己的魔力 - 她的丑陋回忆能力，以便诸如Oletskys之类的家庭可以繁荣而不会痛苦 - 是一种同谋。
Read: The woman who would be Steinbeck
阅读：将成为Steinbeck的女人
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.
当她与小说的另一位叙述者成为朋友时，解毒剂实现了这种认识，这是一位名叫Cleo的摄影师，他通过Resettlement Administration来到内布拉斯加州，这是一个新的交易计划，旨在解决农村贫困。在路上，克莱奥（Cleo）购买了一台似乎能够随着时间看的相机。它的图像曾经开发，显示了Cleo的未来或过去的照片。通常，她可以说她正在寻找自己的时间以外的时间，但无法开始猜测何时。
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.
通过崩溃的时间，罗素将观众拉入本书中。克莱奥（Cleo）制作一张照片时，可能不会认识到21世纪，但我们愿意。小说的一些议程（非常有议程）是创造草原的历史，用解毒剂的话来说，这不是“明显的命运，而是看不见的损失”。罗素显然想让约翰·斯坦贝克（John Steinbeck）的《尘埃碗》（The Dust Bower）的故事复杂化，这些故事往往会集中于白人农民的痛苦，而不会考虑到他们到达西方的痛苦。罗素似乎认为，让美国人忘记后者，这将是国家规模上失去身份的丧失，值得悲伤，实际上是反乌托邦的东西。但是解毒剂不止于此。它的真实项目是击败它开始的幻想：摆脱过去的幻想。在小说中，回忆（如金钱）需要为社会健康而流通。他们在保险库中没有什么好事。
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.
解毒剂的角色倾向于为除解毒者和读者的任何人描述自己的记忆而苦苦挣扎。罗素（Russell）写道，感觉像一系列独白。就像在她的第一本小说中，高度创造力和有趣的Swamplandia！一样，她的散文非常稠密且不寻常，可以坚持慢慢阅读。同时，它是直接和亲密的。尤其是在小说的上半年，她的叙述者似乎正在向我们倾诉，以避免彼此交谈。竖琴是在母亲被谋杀后抚养孤立的侄女戴尔（Dell），从不回忆戴尔（Dell）。解毒剂和克莱奥都尽力与任何人进行有意义的对话。只有罗素将这四个角色置于接近时，他们才开始将自己的一些记忆播放到空中。
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.”
对于戴尔，竖琴和解毒剂而言，谈话是直接康复的。戴尔（Dell）和竖琴（Harp）让戴尔（Dell）的妈妈感到悲伤。竖琴通过他对家人对土地的收购的不安感来努力。解毒剂可以忽略她的作品的本质。但是，对于克莱奥（Cleo），这本书的局外人来说，情况更加复杂。她作为政府摄影师的明确职责是为每个现在和未来的美国人都做出“公开回忆，“丰富的回忆基金”，但即使在她的相机开始展示她的场景不存在之前，她对摄影的真实性几乎没有信心。作为一名艺术家，她知道自己可以操纵自己制作的图像：“人们对我的相机保持警惕，”她承认：“有充分的理由。每个闪光灯都在您的心中持有一块股份。现在，您被钉在一个地方，戴着这种渴望或破碎的表情。皱纹的人类思维和人类思维的海洋和感觉在一生中rips碰到了一生，无法捕捉到任何那个相机。
Read: Whitewashing the Great Depression
阅读：粉刷大萧条
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.
实际上，克莱奥（Cleo）的任务是让她的主题看起来很可怜，尽管不让他们知道她正在这样做。她的图像不仅要成为记忆，还意味着要让国会给农民挣扎的钱。对于黑人的克莱奥（Cleo）来说，这是一个烦恼的任务。她知道 - 而且她的老板经常提醒她 - 如果她拍摄“与国会一起承受着最大体重的面孔的肖像，那是最有可能的成功。引发同情心的雪崩的需求是白人的需求。”罗素在她的书中包括重新安置管理局的真实图像 - 即使在多萝西娅·兰格（Dorothea Lange）著名的“移民母亲”的情况下，这些图像是代表白人痛苦的各种图像，他们的主题不是白人。他们的存在提醒人们，公共记忆可以掩盖它的保留。
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.
解毒剂部分是对尘埃碗的隐藏历史的反应，努力返回流通，这一事实是，土地“吹走了”，正如Harp所说的那样，因为白人定居者从管家中偷走了它。到小说结束时，拉塞尔的角色都在使人们不仅要谈论这种痛苦的集体记忆，而且要谈论他们试图扼杀或包装的过去的所有过去。他们意识到，我们分享回忆的越多，他们对我们的负担就越少，而且至关重要的是，通过他们了解自己的越多。对于戴尔而言，尤其如此：当她开始允许自己谈论母亲时，她敏锐地想念母亲，她变得更加能够在与竖琴的新生活中感到幸福。
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?
罗素（Russell）也以其他方式提出了记忆的观点 - 通过克莱奥（Cleo）的照片展览和关于乌兹（Uz）的警长的子图，他既是解毒剂的敌人，又是她最大的客户之一。有时他会和她一起存放自己的记忆。不过，他经常使用她隐藏证据，因此在黑色星期日之后她的道德困扰。如果有些人在解毒剂的金库中存放的幸福回忆是宝藏，那么从某种意义上说，就是那些可以带来正义的人。综上所述，这些丢失的故事表明，在解毒剂中，隐藏着记忆（无论原因是什么）绝不是一件好事。这位可怜的农民将他的初吻存放在草原女巫中，在黑色的星期日永远失去了它。同时，戴尔因警长的阴谋而失去了知道谁杀死了母亲的机会。这些都是非常不同的损失，但两者都建议拒绝与过去互动的成本。如果一个人或一群人无法回顾他们遭受的弊端，他们将无法撤消自己的伤害或渴望将来做得更好。而且，如果他们不能唤起他们一生的喜悦 - 那就有什么希望呢？
