The glass motel: personal reflections on the fortieth anniversary of 'Lolita'

Literary Review, Fall, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Attached to the letter was a note from my friend, one page single-spaced gutter to gripper, informing me what his novel was about. It was about a child pornographer, an American in Copenhagen during the 1970s, at a time when all laws had been lifted on pornography.

With growing disquietude, I sat there reading that cover note, my little boy and little girl playing on the floor, my wife across the room reading Jung's autobiography. Seeing the old psychiatrist's smiling sage face on the cover of the book, I found one of the sentences in it which had most deeply impressed me coming to mind: "We are no more responsible for the thoughts in our minds than we are for the beasts in the forest." Which I took to mean we did not put them there, we need not feel guilty that they exist; responsibility only begins with action. I borrowed strength and courage from the sentence (even if Jung has since been kicked almost as frequently and enthusiastically as Freud -- "the Viennese witch doctor," in Humbert Humbert's parlance -- and even if Jung's autobiography has since been credited as largely the work of his secretary). I went on reading the work of my new acquaintance.

It began well enough, as I recall, extremely well written and imaginative. With an act of will, I held my mind and heart open, but soon they began to contract like oysters to the lemon, and finally I came to a scene that I felt was threatening to damage my soul.

I use that phrase with some trepidation. It is one that in my youth I would instantly have scoffed at as so much grammar school Dominican Roman Catholic nonsense. I was raised Catholic at a time when the nuns warned girls not to dress in white because it made boys think of bedsheets and not to wear patent leather shoes with a skirt for the shiny toes reflected precious secrets; the boys were cautioned that masturbation led to insanity, sterility, blindness, morbid self-absorption, hairy palms, and a room in hell. I had come to associate the concept of "soul damage" with fear of the body, fear of the act which we can thank for our existence.

However, the phrase had returned to my consciousness a year or so before when Danish television screened an expose of the then current wave of so-called "violence porn" or "splatter" films. A few scenes were shown as examples, and I hesitate to describe them here in detail for fear they will begin to fester in my brain again. One was of a woman in seductive underwear committing suicide with a pair of scissors. Another was of a woman held hostage by two literally nauseating maniacs who were slowly killing her with blows from a hammer to their own merry delight.

The only other occasion on which I have witnessed such ugliness was when I edited, for the therapists at Copenhagen's International Research Center for Torture Victims, a psychiatric handbook in which accounts were included of the behavior of torturers. However, the aim of those accounts was to help therapists learn to heal and bring comfort to the damaged minds, bodies, and souls of the victims (or survivors, as they are now termed). In fact, one of the rules of that Center imposes sharp limits on the number of hours any therapist may spend per day in therapy sessions with survivors precisely because it is so dangerous to the mind and soul of the therapist.