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 argues, does not constitute a meaningful narrative. Rather, it happens in a random and contingent fashion. Following his notion of history which like the Lacanian real ‘resists symbolization absolutely’ (1981: 35), exile, too, refers us to a rupture that is unrepresentable and articulates itself only through the effects of what Jameson would call an ‘absent cause’. Yet is it possible to entirely repudiate allegory in our reading? What are the gains and the limits of a critical language that reads exilic texts in accordance with the allegorical tropes developed by psychoanalysis? And how, finally, can we evaluate the recurrent references Hitchcock and Nabokov make to Freud?

My readings in this book have made two allegorical claims. As I have been arguing, exile can be read as the ‘absent cause’ of Hitchcock's and Nabokov's respective narratives and languages, while Freud's metaphors revolving around the subject and its family relations lend themselves particularly well to an analysis of aesthetic figurations of exile.