From 1935 to 1944, the Farm Security Administration commissioned photographs of life during the Great Depression, and in particular, the Dust Bowl. Roy Stryker, head of the New Deal photographic initiative, was a merciless editor, and to obtain his desired portrayal of American rural poverty, he rejected thousands of negatives from Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein and others, not only declining to display them but also mutilating the images, “killing” them with a hole punch. In 2018, London’s Whitechapel Gallery hosted an exhibition of these altered photographs, titled Killed Negatives: Unseen Images of 1930s America.
In some of the photographs from Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, the effect of the hole punch is surreal, even a little funny, the black hole appearing like an eclipse over a brittle landscape, or a ball bouncing into the scene. In others, it has a harsher effect, as when the hole punctures a person’s face. These missing circles are an easy metaphor for lost memories, reminding us how simple it is to alter the way history is told.
Like Killed Negatives, Karen Russell’s second novel, The Antidote, transforms the iconic American imagery of the Dust Bowl into a stunning work of art: daring, masterful, hard to look away from. Her novel includes some of these censored Dust Bowl images, and a New Deal photographer named Cleo—whose Graflex Speed Graphic camera has an unusual power, and whose work has been rejected many times via Stryker’s punch—is one of the central characters in this Technicolor epic of land, history and memory.
Within The Antidote, the hole punch-like sense of something missing is represented by the titular character, a prairie witch known as the Antidote. She is a “Vault”—a bank of sorts, not for money but for memories. “I will take whatever they cannot stand to know,” the Antidote thinks in a memory of her training as a Vault. “The memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regret and grief. Whatever they hope to preserve in the future. Whatever cargo unbalances the cart. . . . Milk, honey, rainwater, venom, blood. Horror, happiness, sorrow, regret—pour it all into me.”
The witch was the very first seed of the book, an idea that came to Russell when she was finishing up her Pulitzer-finalist debut novel, Swamplandia!, in 2009. Speaking by phone from Oregon, Russell says that at that time she had been writing around trauma, personal and familial, and exploring how private traumas can aggregate into a mass denial. “That’s how I write, kind of like a child,” she says. “I like to literalize these things that are very abstract. . . . The question becomes, what kinds of forgetting are we ceaselessly encouraged to do, just to go on living as we do? What can people not carry into the future?”
Along with the Antidote and Cleo, the novel follows several other citizens of Uz, Nebraska, including a humble farmer named Harp whose wheat crop is flourishing while his neighbors struggle to make ends meet. Russell cracks a joke that “it’s hard to make [soil] sexy,” but Harp’s tender sections make a good go of it. There’s also Harp’s niece, Dell, a teenage basketballer who’s mourning the murder of her mother.
“You can’t imagine a viable future, a world that’s kinder and more just than what we’ve got going today, without returning to the past.”
Inevitability is a powerful presence in the novel, which is bookended by two true events: the Black Sunday dust storm and the deadly Republican River flood. By 1935, when the book begins, nothing can avert these disasters. Even the New Deal agency soil expert sent to screen The Plow That Broke the Plains for Uz’s farmers is forced to admit that they can’t get their topsoil back.
But though some events seem inevitable, it’s apparent that hard lines can yet be redrawn. The way Russell considers the ecological elements of her novel is a distinct departure from the majority of environmental fiction, which is dominated by doomsday narratives, as if complete ecosystem collapse were already inescapable.
“I really went into this thinking, I want to tune my imagination to a future that’s not apocalyptic,” Russell says. “Elvia Wilk . . . wrote a book called Death by Landscape, and she talks about how utopias and dystopias are coterminous. I also love Joy Williams’ Harrow. What a dark book, but you can often feel the seeds of a future world, right? You can feel a resistance or a countervailing force, even if it’s like a micro-utopia, or a community of dreamers that make themselves a blueprint that’s not this fortress world.”
When it comes to what Russell calls “the weathervaning of utopias and dystopias,” Cleo’s magical camera is the novel’s greatest tool, as distinct as Philip Pullman’s subtle knife. It has the power to reveal scenes from the past, when the Pawnee people farmed the land effectively and nondestructively, as well as possible futures, good and bad. (At the end of the book, a “Land Lost Acknowledgment,” co-authored with historian James Riding In, recounts the history of the Pawnees, whose presence on the Central Plains predates foreign settlers by at least a thousand years.)
“You can’t imagine a viable future, a world that’s kinder and more just than what we’ve got going today, without returning to the past,” Russell says. “I just don’t think that you can skip that step. One of the exciting things about this book for me was [that] so many of the solutions are here with us today. We don’t have to indenture ourselves to Elon Musk’s space fleet.”
As for those solutions, Russell points to Land Back efforts and the work of Rebecca Clarren, whose book The Cost of Free Land investigates the history of her Jewish family’s land as stolen from the Lakota. Another solution: We consider our whole history, no holes punched. Through novels like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, more stories based on our nation’s full history are reaching readers. In The Antidote, the Dust Bowl is the perfect metaphor for the United States: Without deep roots to hold our story together, nothing new can grow. Russell brings up the recent wave of legislation restricting the teaching of racial history in public schools, as we’ve seen proposed in more than 70% of U.S. state legislatures in the first half of the 2020s. To pass laws that forbid the teaching of true American history in classrooms is to risk a cultural dust bowl, with children primed to perpetuate the individualistic mistakes of their parents and grandparents out of pure ignorance.
“I was taught this history in a very partitioned way, and it’s like, the dispossession of Indigenous people happens over here, and the Dust Bowl happens over here, and they’re in separate boxes. That started to feel like lunacy to me,” says Russell. She describes how textbooks make the connection between ecological and environmental collapse, “but it was very strange to me that we omit the violence and dispossession and attempted genocide and ethnocide.”
What enables our forgetting is a hollow perception of scarcity, represented by the phrase “better you than me” (a refrain in the novel) and its cousin, “I’ll give when I have more for myself.”
“You have to partition your own heart and consciousness to live the way that we do,” Russell says, describing how it’s “so tempting” to ignore the injustice and suffering around us. “You have to exile a lot from your waking awareness, and you have to tell the story that, ‘Oh, well, that has nothing to do with me,’ which is such a fatally lonely story.”
Instead, Russell’s characters find themselves blessed with little miracles that force them out of step with the tradition of forgetting. “The emptiness of any place is an illusion,” Cleo says. “That’s what this camera has taught me. Any piece of earth is brimming over with living. I think this must be what the poets mean when they write in the fullness of time.” Books like The Antidote often leave a reader wondering, “OK, what am I supposed to do to fix all this?” But Russell’s novel won’t leave you at all. It’s a cascade of razed illusions, brimming over with living.
Photos by Carl Mydans. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.
Karen Russell author photo © Annette Hornischer.
