Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov
Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov
Barbara Straumann
Copyright Date: 2008
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Pages: 248
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r28v3
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Book Info
Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov
Book Description:

This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. _x000B_Straumann's close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt.

eISBN: 978-0-7486-3647-1
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-v)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. vi-vi)
    Barbara Straumann
  4. Abbreviations
    Abbreviations (pp. vii-viii)
  5. Chapter 1 Introduction
    Chapter 1 Introduction (pp. 1-30)

    In late 1964, Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov cross paths for a short period of time. Hitchcock, the filmmaker, approaches Nabokov, the writer, for a joint project. After a telephone conversation, the two exchange several plot ideas revolving around spectacular scenarios of dislocation: the story of a homeless girl whose widowed father manages a large international hotel with the rest of the family members posing as concierge, cashier, chef, housekeeper as well as a bedridden matriarch, while, in fact, they form a shady ‘backstage’ gang of crooks; a starlet whose astronaut lover appears to be curiously changed after his return...

  6. Part I Nabokov’s Dislocations
    • Chapter 2 Refiguring Loss and Exile in Speak, Memory
      Chapter 2 Refiguring Loss and Exile in Speak, Memory (pp. 33-85)

      Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1967), which first appeared as Conclusive Evidence (1951), is marked by multiple revisitations. The memoir returns to powerful scenes of an autobiographical past not only to re-create and repossess a lost geocultural world together with a childhood family home of extraordinary bliss, but also to pretend that, on some level, displacement, death and loss have not occurred. As I shall argue in this chapter, it is precisely in its attempt to undo a cataclysmic past that the survior text comes to be haunted and revisited by the burden of a disturbing knowledge.

      As we consider Nabokov’s...

    • Chapter 3 ′Aesthetic Bliss′ and Its Allegorical Displacements in Lolita
      Chapter 3 ′Aesthetic Bliss′ and Its Allegorical Displacements in Lolita (pp. 86-124)

      Language is what matters in Lolita (1955/1958), according to Nabokov, and it is also what my ‘exilic’ reading of the novel will focus on. In his 1956 postscript, Nabokov describes Lolita as ‘the record of my love affair’ with the English language rather than with the romantic novel (LO: 316). His love declaration can be taken to allude to the fact that Lolita came to mark his arrival as an American author, even though the manuscript had initially been rejected by US publishers for fear of prosecution. The novel became a succès de scandale through its publication, in 1955, by...

  7. Part II Hitchcock’s Wanderings
    • Chapter 4 Inhabiting Feminine Suspicion
      Chapter 4 Inhabiting Feminine Suspicion (pp. 127-164)

      In Rebecca (1940), the first film Hitchcock made after moving from his British home to Hollywood, exile and memory take centre stage. Hitchcock’s narrative revolves around an unnamed, orphaned heroine (Joan Fontaine) who longs for a home to overcome her dislocation and who finds out after her marriage that she cannot inhabit Manderley as its mistress. The film opens, however, with a retrospective frame underscoring the condition of exile in which the heroine finds herself after the house has burnt down. Her voice-over and the camera retrace how, in her dream, she approaches Manderley along the meandering drive, leading from...

    • Chapter 5 Wandering and Assimilation in North by Northwest
      Chapter 5 Wandering and Assimilation in North by Northwest (pp. 165-200)

      At an early stage in the preparation of the screenplay for North by Northwest (1959), the screenwriter Ernest Lehman summarised his ambition in the following laconic statement: ‘All I want to do’, he said, ‘is write the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.’ Asked by the director what such a film would entail, he replied: ‘Something with wit, glamor, sophistication, suspense, many different colorful locals, a real movie movie’ (Lehman 1999: vii). As if following Lehman’s wish for a film that would sum up Hitchcock’s previous work in a retrospective homage, the voyage undertaken by North by Northwest revisits...

    • Chapter 6 Epilogue: Psychoanalytic Dislocation
      Chapter 6 Epilogue: Psychoanalytic Dislocation (pp. 201-219)

      What does it mean to map psychoanalysis, its critical narratives and tropes, onto aesthetic refigurations of exile as I have done in my readings of Hitchcock’s and Nabokov’s literary and cinematic texts? Does a psychoanalytical perspective miss the specificity of individual exile because it emphasises the subject’s psychic dislocation as a universal human condition? Fredric Jameson, reflecting on interpretation, criticises the tendency of interpretative allegory to rewrite a specific event – or its figuration in an aesthetic text – in terms of a master narrative and thus to reduce it to the latent meaning of a privileged key. History, he...

  8. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 220-236)
  9. Index
    Index (pp. 237-240)
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