Karen Odden: Trains and Trauma

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted to introduce debut historical mystery writer Karen Odden. She's the author of A LADY IN THE SMOKE: A VICTORIAN MYSTERY:

Following a humiliating fourth Season in London, Lady Elizabeth Fraser is on her way back to her ancestral country estate when her train careens off the rails and bursts into flames. Though she is injured, she manages to drag herself and her unconscious mother out of the wreckage, and amid the chaos that ensues, a brilliant young railway surgeon saves her mother’s life. Elizabeth feels an immediate connection with Paul Wilcox—though society would never deem a medical man eligible for the daughter of an earl.

After Paul reveals that the train wreck was no accident, and the inspector who tried to prevent it dies under mysterious circumstances, Elizabeth undertakes a dangerous investigation of her own that leads back to her family’s buried secrets. The more she learns, the more she must risk. Not only are her dowry and her reputation at stake; Paul’s very life hangs in the balance when he is arrested for manslaughter. As the trial draws near, and Parliament prepares for a vote that will change the course of the nation, Elizabeth uncovers a conspiracy that has been years in the making. But time is running out for her to see justice done.

Today Karen's visiting Jungle Reds to talk about Victorians, railway accidents, and trauma. As someone who writes about war and PTSD (before it was even diagnosed or named that) I found this piece fascinating. Welcome, Karen!

KAREN ODDEN: When I first began researching railways over a decade ago, my interest was actually in trauma. I’d been reading Oppenheim and Freud, whose late-1800s treatises began to describe traumatic neurosis. But as I read, I found myself thinking, OK, these guys are clever, but surely the notion of “trauma” didn’t spring into their heads out of nowhere. As I began to read histories of trauma and PTSD (a diagnosis officially accepted in 1980), I realized that to some extent, trauma began with the accounts of Victorian railway disasters.

One of the most famous accounts came from Charles Dickens, who survived a horrifying crash in 1865. He crawled out of his toppled railway car, dragging his mistress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and his manuscript for Our Mutual Friend behind him. He spent several hours ministering to other victims, serving them brandy from his hat. Then, he walked home. But in the days following, he had ringing in his ears; he had nightmares; and his hands shook so badly he couldn’t sign his usual flourish. By the 1860s, some medical men attributed these symptoms to “railway spine” or “concussion of the spine.” But most admitted they didn’t really understand it.

Intrigued by all this, I headed off to the London libraries to see if I could find other accounts. Little did I know. I found hundreds of newspaper articles, poems, sensation novels, parliamentary papers, cartoons, pamphlets, and medical treatises. Clearly, Victorians had a lot of anxiety about railway accidents! What I began to notice, though, was how many accounts hinted at how the experience was beyond words: “This railway disaster is simply too terrible to describe”; “the horror of it defies all description.” 

On the other hand, there were often strange overlaps or excesses in the accounts. For example, this illustration from a medical textbook is of a spine, but it’s drawn in a way that suggests a railway track too; thus, one illustration suggests both the cause of the injury and the injury itself. With a jolt, I realized that these failures of language and excesses of meaning were akin to the unspeakability and profusion of symptoms that we now associate with trauma and PTSD.

What began to interest me—after I recovered from the painful dissertation process—was how creative writers since the late 1800s have experimented with different literary elements to represent trauma.

One modern example is Tender is the Night. Beginning in 1925 and drawing on his experience of his wife Zelda’s mental illness, Fitzgerald wrote this story about a psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his former patient/wife Nicole, who suffers from mental illness brought about by the (arguably) traumatizing experience of being molested by her father. Significantly, in the first version, the novel contains three sections: the troubled present; a jump to the past (when Dick treated Nicole); and a return to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, his critics didn’t like the “novel” structure. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend Malcolm Cowley revised it so the story became chronological. But I think part of the power and discomfort that the original novel generates comes from the ruptures. 

Jump forward to after WWII, when the symptoms of “shell shock” (a post-WWI diagnosis) were well known. One of my favorite J.D. Salinger’s stories, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” (1948) concerns a WWII soldier who meets a precocious young girl in an English tearoom before he leaves for the front. He survives five campaigns, but afterward he suffers from nervous tics; he can’t sleep or eat; he smokes incessantly; he has chewed his nails down until they bleed. Halfway through the story, there is a gap of white space, followed by:

            This is the squalid … part of the story. I’m still around, but from here on … I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.   

            It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice.

The shift from first-person to third-person, the white space, and the meta-comment about the “disguise” suggest that by this point, conventions existed for representing the trauma of war, and people could begin to acknowledge war’s effects on those who survived it.

Now for the twenty-first century. I just read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel “Fun Home,” which demands a constant, even jarring switch back and forth between words and pictures. As I read, I felt in some way that the constant switching made me feel the unease of shuffling between two realities: the pain of knowing a frightening truth about a father and the desire not to know it.

What I love about literature is that it evolves. Maybe, as Christopher Booker once wrote, there are really only seven plots; I don’t know. But the ways stories are told changes over time. The flashback that breaks Tender is the Night doesn’t seem so “novel” any more. We’ve all seen the wry type of “meta” that Salinger uses in “Esme.” But what keeps literature vital is that writers are continually experimenting with form and structure and language, daring to stretch the bounds for representing human experience.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Karen! Reds and lovely readers, we all read lots of mysteries and thrillers. Many of them deal with murder in an intellectual way (Sherlock Holmes, for example), yet others let their protagonists take the brunt of what they have witnessed and experienced. Who's your favorite character who's experienced a profound change in life/personality/outlook due to trauma? Who's your favorite character who seems to remain perpetually trauma-free? Please tell us in the comments!

Karen Odden's interest in the Victorian era and specifically railway crashes goes back to her New York University doctoral dissertation, which explored how the medical, parliamentary, and literary representations of railway disasters helped to create a discourse out of which Freud and others fashioned their ideas of “trauma.”

Karen has served as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and taught classes in English language and literature at New York University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She has contributed essays and chapters to books and journals, including Studies in the Novel, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation; and she has written introductions for Barnes and Noble’s Classics Series editions of books by Dickens and  Trollope. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in English, she worked as an Editorial Assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and McGraw-Hill, as a Media Buyer for Christie’s Auction House in New York, and as a bartender at the airport in Rochester, where she learned how to stop being shy. She is a member of SCBWI and Mystery Writers of America; and she currently serves as an Assistant Editor for the academic journal, Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP).

Karen currently resides in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, her two children, and her ridiculously cute beagle, Rosy.

JAN BROGAN -  Because I always read brain books,  I'm reading Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro. This is no pop-psychology book, Shapiro invented the EMDR therapy technique I write about frequently. This is a rigorously-tested therapy that is used extensively by the Department of Defense to treat combat veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

I'm reading this book because I love everything to do with the brain, and because I'm pretty sure this woman is a genius in the field of psychology, but I'm finding it extremely relevant to fiction writing.  Shapiro explains in detail how the brain makes associations "in relation to everything we do, think, or feel."  And that every single past experience heavily influences "most of our characteristics and responses to the world."

She later goes on to detail certain patients where their past experiences reveal themselves in physical ticks and ailments.

I can't help but think this is handy both for our protagonists and the incredibly messed up villains we often create.

Yesterday we talked about how clothes - or something superficial - make character -in a sort of short hand use.  Here, I'm interested in how the depth of experience and memoir make character.

I've never been a big fan of coming up with an entire character bio before I start writing a new book, but now I'm thinking that it may be important to know more about the both the deep and minor trauma that a character has experienced and how he/she may have adapted to them.  In other words, I need to know more about my character's nightmares.

So tell me Reds, what MUST you know of your characters's pasts and past experiences before you start writing?  And what might you find out along the way?

LUCY BURDETTE: I feel like I need to know my character's family history--I thought this when I worked as a therapist too. For instance, Cassie Burdette, aspiring golfer, came from divorced parents and an alcoholic mother who felt helpless to change her life. Her mother interpreted Cassie's successes as a sign of Cassie moving away from her--and toward her father. This wasn't all conscious of course, but it hampered Cassie's growth to believe that success in golf and life felt like a betrayal to her mom. That's the kind of thing I need to start out with--so the conflicts become part of the character's motivations and choices.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: You know? I think this may be THE most important thing about character creation. I am too lazy to make character bibles, but you can be sure I know and dig into my characters' pasts...oh, absolutely. Jane Ryland's mother was incredibly supportive and thoughtful--but she died. (I know, but I wrote it BEFORE my mother died! And mine, well, "supportive and thoughtful" would not be in the top ten words I'd choose to describe her.) Jane's father is brusque and withholding and controlling--she's tried to please him since she was a little kid.

I do, Jan, find out some of it along the way. "Why would you do that?" I wonder, when a character surprises me. And then I realize why. It also works the other way--I think: here's a man who's trying to prove he's as good a cop as his grandfather was. What would he do now? And the answer appears.

HALLIE EPHRON: That's exactly what it's like for me! There's nothing more important for the main character than to know what's the seminal experience or relationship from the character's past that drives her, consciously or unconsciously, in the present. Then, when the character does something that surprises me, I have to come around again and figure out how that makes sense in light of the character's past experiences.

Characters are often trying to "get it right this time."

RHYS BOWEN: Molly Murphy's mother's voice is a constant in her head, usually criticizing her behavior. Her mother was a negative, self-righteous person, a drudge who died young, so not wanting to turn out like her mother is a big driving force behind Molly's actions.
Lady Georgie's mother is still very much around, but Georgie still feels the betrayal of when her mother ran out on them when she was only a baby. She knows that her mother is not someone she can trust. And she finds out in Naughty in Nice that her father had also been someone she couldn't trust. Luckily she has a Cockney grandfather who has become her rock.

Both my heroines have had to contend with being utterly alone and having no one to rely on. It has made them stronger.

I am always amazed and delighted when my characters surprise me by revealing something about themselves. I didn't know that Evan was claustrophobic until he had to go through the Chunnel and came up green and sweating. Then, of course, I sent him down a slate mine. We have to make our characters suffer to get the best out of them!

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  This is so interesting, Jan!  I have a character suffering from PTSD in NO MARK UPON HER, Kieran Connolly, who was a medic in Iraq and lost his unit to an IED, so I had done quite a bit of reading about EMDR.  And in the WIP (must remember to ask my editor if I can go public with the title--I'm getting tired of calling it the WIP) the whole book revolves around a traumatic experience suffered by one of the characters when he was thirteen.

Hank, I don't do official character bibles, either, but I do work out very complicated back stories for the characters, usually in a journal, before I actually start writing the book. But the most fun is when you discover things about your characters in the process of writing, like Rhys did with Evan.  I think it's that good old right brain/left brain thing again--the logical work we do on our characters beforehand allows those "magic" things to happen as the story unfolds!

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I usually sketch out a brief bio for each of the main characters, but in the same way that you get to know people in real life, I get to know the characters as they grow on my pages. The book I'm writing now is somewhat different from the first four books in that there's a lot of backstory - except I've just realized that it isn't backstory - it's the story. And the characters' past experiences very much influence the way they behave.

JAN: So tell us, what do you think the role of pain and experience is in our fictional characters? In our every day life ?

The many traumas in real life and documentary film maker Michael Burns

JAN BROGAN - I might have mentioned once or twice that I had a debilitating plane phobia for many years. I would hyperventilate during takeoff, my palms would sweat, and once I even broke down crying. I tried just about everything. Drinking - didn't even touch it. Six weeks of hypnosis at Mass General Hospital was completely useless; desensitization tapes - even more useless, and psychiatrist-prescribed drugs - totally freaked me out. Cognitive behavioral therapy helped, but only a little.

Finally, I tried a new therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which involved bilateral stimulation (either by eye movement or alternating tones) during treatment. As a health reporter, I'd been assigned to write about this therapy by an editor, and although I first refused, calling it "snake oil," I later learned just how extensively researched and tested this therapy really was and about its tremendous success treating returning combat veterans suffering from Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Somewhere in the literature it mentioned it had some success with phobias, so I decided to give it a try.

After being burdened this incredibly resistant phobia for something close to 25 years, I was completely cured in about six sessions. For me, it was a miracle. In subsequent stories I've written on this topic, I've talked to returning veterans, rape victims and child abuse survivors who have told me their own miraculous recovery stories.

So.... in what is definitely outside the box for Jungle Red, but in hopes of reaching the quarter million combat veterans who return with PTSD and other people suffering from other life traumas - whether its loss of a loved one, a divorce or even a minor car accident, I invited filmmaker Michael Burns to JR to talk about his documentary "EMDR, We either transform pain or we transmit it."

Michael is a native of Connecticut, is the producer/director of four films on American politics, Third Party, Preventive Warriors, Majority Rules, and Laban. I asked him how he got from politics to EMDR.

MichaelBurns: It was 2007 and I was completing my doctorate in film at the University of Birmingham in the UK when I had EMDR myself. I had come across it in the late David Servan-Schreiber's best-seller Healing without Freud or Prozac. When I had a breakthrough myself- and this shows you how much I sympathize with skeptics- I chalked it entirely up to coincidence. In other words, I was convinced that the EMDR I had had just activated some psychosomatic reaction on my part. I remember thinking that there's no way something so weird could have helped me. Simply out of curiosity I started to do some research on it and found out that in fact millions of people have had massively life-changing experiences with EMDR. So I ate up everything I could find on the subject, realizing that the catharsis I went through was not so unusual after all.

At about that time, a good friend suggested I make a documentary about EMDR since it still was hardly known at all in the mainstream. Completing my degree, which took a lot out of me, I didn't think I had the energy for a new project, but it kept popping up in the back of my mind as something that needed to be made. In the end, it was the daily bombardment with PTSD stories in the news that made me realize that I wanted to do whatever I could to help spread the word about this amazing therapy. There are so many people out there who believe that they're destined to live with the pain, body sensations, and nightmares that are grounded in things from their pasts. It's just not true. EMDR can help many of them, perhaps most of them.

JAN: How long did it take to produce the documentary and what was the biggest obstacle?

MICHAEL: I worked on it, pretty much with just my cameraman, James Kloter, for a little over three years.

The biggest obstacle was getting people to tell us their personal stories. A friend of mine put it very well the other day when she said that it's hard enough to go to therapy in the first place, relaying those details to yet another person is nearly impossible for most people. I think she's exactly right. What happens in EMDR sessions is both deeply personal and extremely hard to put into words. So, on a low budget, it became tough for us to find compelling, personal success stories to put in the movie. In the end though, we found three that did make it in, and they might just be the best parts of the film.

JAN: Your hopes for this film?

MICHAEL: I sincerely hope that people will watch this film and get in touch with that one person in their lives- maybe it's a husband, a sister, or a friend of a friend- whose ability to reach their full potential is being held back by something that happened in their past, and to tell them about EMDR. Next step is to go to the emdria.org website and to find a therapist nearby or to get in touch with emdrhap.org to talk about sessions they're offering. It's critical that people go see someone with proper training, certified by the main national EMDR professional organization, EMDRIA.

So helping those who are in critical mental condition is one of my key hopes. Having said that, EMDR is not just for the person we might know who's paralyzed by the past. I always say that it would be a miracle if any of us have sailed through life without anything traumatic happening to us. There are things in all of our histories that are holding us back, preventing us from living life the way we want to. Therefore all of us can use EMDR so that we can put disturbing memories to rest, breaking destructive habits we have and living the lives we dream of living.

JAN: In that vein, Michael has generously sent me one free copy of the film, the DVD, to give away to a lucky winner. It's one of the best explanations I've encountered on how the brain processes trauma, why it sticks in the head for years, and why EMDR can shake it free and is very moving.

Enter by posting a comment and/or signing up for our mailing list -- I need an email address to reach the winner. But please, enter only if know someone (and it can be you) who it can help. The winner will also be announced on JR by Tuesday.

For more information about EMDR or the film go to: http://emdrmovie.com