| Summary: | In 2009, the text that would have been Vladimir Nabokovs final novel, The Original of Laura, was published against the late authors explicit instructions. Although the controversy surrounding Lauras publication ostensibly stemmed from this violation of Nabokovs wishes, objections to the novels publication (as voiced in a host of negative reviews) chiefly hinged on the texts supposed aesthetic shortcomings. In this paper, I offer a reading of both the text itself and the publication controversy in terms of the implied image of the author. Crucially, Laura was not published as a simple transcription of Nabokovs existing draft, but as a mass-produced manuscript, a series of facsimiles of the original draft, as written in the authors own hand. I read the manuscript, first, as photographically reproduced traces of the dead, then as an implied portrait of the author. I argue that Laura actively uses the readers desire for the late author to construct an image of the dead, but that this portrait also always problematically effaces the existing image of the author.
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