The CD ROM offers, then, not story or history but a compilation of film, video and aural truth -- constructed as Truth, not just via a (limited) documentary tradition but now compounded by the ideology of information. An Archive as database to be accessed. Even Art was seduced by the 'illusion' that it could contain 'zillions of things'. Or so he says.²

CD ROM, not just as a repository of truth through access to 'originals' (sketches, photos, interviews), but through provision of quantity. CD ROMs offer an ersatz archive, refigured within the 'Mode of Information' where information per se is 'privileged' and the 'configuration of information exchange' is not questioned. With this fetishisation of information, quantity consumes quality³ -- and masquerades as transparency and completeness of meaning. All we can see and hear on the CD ROM is information, organised as infotainment; the complex story/history of the novel turned into empiricist History. We scamper around amongst data, rather than lingering on 'the work'. We have bought 'interaction' as choices in accessing information rather than working through history and reading the work -- all of which takes time and contemplation, which are not, after all, experiences encouraged for speed addicted, itchy-fingered users of digital technology.⁴ Speed cuts across/cuts out time and space as memory, and replaces it with instantaneity.

Maus' storytelling voices of history and memory, on the other hand, are voices which are locatable, contextual, voices with duration. Voices which have a materiality through their graphicness and occupation of time and space even though they are not sounded. They resound in the quiet despite their 'silence' and are too intense to pin down.⁵ The Complete Maus' Voices of History and Authority, which are sounded, are in some ways less material and vivid. These extradiegetic authors and movers allow the user limited questions, connections, perceptions, positions, subjectivities, as if they are a full choice. Now that we can hear them, we can know them -- or recognize them as ones who know.

The blurb on the back of the CD ROM box promises '² hours of the original audio interviews between Art and Vladek Spiegelman' and 'Hundreds of sketches and family photos that have never been seen before'. Never seen, original audio. It's an invitation, a kindling of a desire to bring back the Author, the originator, whose true essence is recognisable through the Voice. The sound in the CD ROM ties us into an originary narrative, via Voice. Now we have Art unmasked, as never before seen, telling us, in his own voice, what his intentions were, his relationship to 'the Art character' in the book and to Vladek. And we hear (and can see transcribed) Vladek's 'original' interviews. We can measure how well Art rendered him. Or, as Art says:

So that rather than having me always win in my discussions with Vladek of how something's going to be presented, to be able to let him have the last word and to actually have it be a heard word.⁶

'Last word' suggests first word; 'heard word' bespeaks recognised word -- a tying again of sound and voice to origins and authority. The Complete Maus -- total, complete, final, last words.

Under the sign of presence of the original, this CD ROM version of voice and sound sits within the illusory limits of 'faithful reproduction', rather than radical reproduction or the possibilities of representation.⁷ So despite the claims of CD ROMs to radical non-narrativity, it takes narrativity to another dimension, to the ultimate ontological narrative: who Art and Vladek really are; what meaning they intend for the work. A work of Art rather than a work of art. And what is 'the work' now? Is it within a new medium, opening the way to new perceptions⁸ or a conglomeration of low quality versions of existing media masquerading as a new medium? Which is not to say that new media do not draw on the existing, but to draw on is different from just accumulating. And without the sensuality of the earlier drawings. To access Maus in The Complete Maus is not only to miss the visual pleasures of the novel, but also to lack some new visual experiences and pleasures appropriate to a new medium, with new forms and new genres. It is also to lose the impact and pleasure of the novel's narrative pull, under the alibi that linear narrative is somehow by definition bad -- a delusion which also neglects the radical and innovative form/content of the graphic novel with its play of masks.

Masks. Masks enable and carry a different sonic history of voice than the CD ROM has accessed. In the traditions of sound in ancient Greek and Roman drama, commedia dell'arte and Hollywood animation, voice and sound through masks play differing but always provocative roles. In a short essay, I can only scurry past a complex history and controversies of interpretation...and present a version of this genealogy, a version which reveals the possibilities rather than the limits of sound. In ancient Greek and Roman drama the mask with its (sometimes) protuberant mouth was about sound, for sound -- 'per sona', persona -- a technology used by a player to enable the voice to carry to the back of the amphitheatre as well as a surface on which to depict stock character traits.⁹ A play between character and character, so that what is revealed by the technology and techniques of the mask is the persona of the character, not some true essence of an individual. In commedia dell'arte, with its half masks and (often animal) characters, there was a play by the actors between character and character, and between mask and mouth -- the character already written on the mask, and the character played by the speaking mouth. But neither is 'true' nor originary nor essential. In animation, some different mouse trails can be followed. Those of 'mickey mousing', for instance -- the term for the particular animation synching of music to image, which renders the sound and image inseparable and equal and undoes the subordination of sound to image. Indeed there is an elasticity, a 'multimorphic' quality of sound (and image) in terms of space, event, object, voice: 'The "distorted" voices of cartoon characters are analogous to their "distorted" and "elastic" bodies'.¹⁰ There is also a disruption of body, voice and sound: 'voices, sounds and music [are] spread out over the bodies of both characters and objects'.¹¹

Not by chance, in animation (as compared to live action) there has been space for different performances and modalities of sound -- sound that can function iconically and analogously, rather than indexically and literally; image that can perform in 'distortion and counterpoint' to the sound.¹² Rather than drawing on this genealogy, The Complete Maus instead promises reproduction and Original Truth, not just through the Voice, as I have argued, but also through sound and music. With archival material, talking heads, voice-over narration, the sound says 'documentary' and Truth. And the sound is anchored, held down, limited by the image. The CD ROM is vision-driven: both vision-centred and driven not to linger and decay in time and space. Rather than the animation line of Mickey Mouse's graphic 'movement' in space as a 'dynamic process', the CD ROM is driven by a different sort of mouse, running with a different sort of speed in a different sort of space.¹³ It does not have a sound which roams around or maps out space because of the way space (and time) are eliminated by a digital imperative and kinaesthetics. Not surprisingly, given the relation of sound to bodies, although users are sped up, they are also tied down by this digital documentary sonic realism.

But of course there was no sound in Maus, beyond the reader's turning of pages and perhaps the quiet dropping of tears. So isn't the CD ROM also giving us access to a sensual pleasure we couldn't have with Maus? Well, yes, and that's where I lose track of the simple story I had intended to tell here about voice, sound and CD ROMs. True, the sound quality is unnecessarily and infuriatingly limited (you'll never convince me it is technically impossible to do better -- or different -- not, at least, until it is culturally possible to expect something different or better). True, sound as bait for the trap of resurrecting the Author and an 'aura' can be retrograde, and at least contradict the hype about a radical new medium. And yet. And yet...

And yet you can hear a body in Vladek's voice, a rhythm, an accent, intensities. So the historical embodied voice, the voice of the body and of culture, works against the Voice of the soul, of the Author. Vladek as storyteller, not fountain of truth; a survivor of the holocaust as something to be worked through -- through storytelling -- not as something singularly transcendental (personally or historically) in meaning. And you can also hear the sound of the technology: the poor quality tape recorders whose 'noise' speaks of the everyday, contingent, mobile quality of the recording events; the sound of the exercycle Vladek rode during some recording sessions; and even the difficulty of making out his words. This sound of the technology, trace of the event and context, is still more a squeak than a bark -- it is not encouraged, or perhaps even allowed, to be insistent -- you can choose to read a transcript at the same time, thereby directing attention to the words and the transcription (correct meaning and accuracy) rather than the speaking, material, historically located voice. And yet this 'noise' hasn't been eliminated in total subservience to 'information' as digital modes usually require.¹⁴ And so the intense and cultural quality of the voice also somehow escapes the narrow intentions and even imperatives of the CD ROM form, thanks, ironically, to the technological/aesthetic lack of attention to sound quality (and ideological concern with authenticity). Vladek's voice is not quite there -- so if you do want to listen, you have to listen carefully.

And Art? True, he's there to satisfy the need (re)created by the CD ROM form to know about the Author, his every sketch, his every intention, rather than to read his work. His own voice confirms this, telling, for instance, that he was unhappy with the way some people read 'the Art character' in the novel as him.¹⁵ The CD ROM intends to re-dress the character, to take off his mask. And yet...

And yet there is a tension between the trajectory of the CD ROM form (and its deadly serious and derivative invocations of sound and image) and the trajectory of the New York Jewish humour and its ironic (re)presentations of the self in Maus, a tension and an excess present in Art's voice and performance, which makes The Complete Maus less complete but more full. Art escapes the imperatives of Truth, Archive, and the CD ROM way, thanks to his irony, his raw edge, and his perception. Even at the moments when Art explains himself, he not only blows the breath of life back into the balloon of 'Author' but at the same time pricks it with knife edge humour:

Vladek was a very good story teller...And unlike certain survivors was not reluctant to talk about it although unlike certain other survivors he had no specific need to bear witness. What he had a need for was for his son to hang out and be around and about the only way I could arrange for that to happen was with a microphone holding him at bay. And so he was glad that I was there and he was willing to talk about this stuff.¹⁶

And so there is a creative role for sound in their relationship that escapes the confines of the vision-driven CD ROM. And if your desire is sound you can find pleasure sniffing through the pages via the 'Find Art audio' or the 'Find Vladek audio'. And you can even play them together, varying their volumes and start times -- a sort of mix, and a mix up of the transcendent realities that the form implies. That's where you can finally get lost in the sound, where the inbuilt impetus to move with the vision, to speed through dataspace, faded. You fade Vladek and Art in and out of each other, playing with their relationship, understanding the play of their relationship -- not fixed in meaning, despite the heavy weight of the holocaust and despite the heavy weight of the form (as an archive of information, so 'complete', so final).

Fading. The faded quality of the recordings of Vladek are part of their appeal. A feeling of ephemerality, not fully there (not complete). Difficult to grasp. Nibbling at the ear. Exceeding the authenticating role assigned to them by the CD ROM form. So, perhaps, it is in the sound, which is so limited, that a whiff of the possibilities of something new in the form emerges. But just a squeak and not as hyped and despite the promise. Perhaps this is sensed more easily when The Complete Maus is read not against the graphic novel Maus but heard across an interactive sound event that created a very different listening/speaking space. A tasty morsel for light relief from digital fingerfood.

'Expresso', broadcast (as part of 'Food for Thought' on Sideshow, Radio 2SER FM) in Sydney in June 1995, invited listeners, via 'talkback' facilities, to participate in a partly scripted play and take it where they wanted. The responses were not what the writers/actors had anticipated and planned for. The actors' gasps (surprise, delight, confusion) expressed and took place in a suspended moment (momentary silence) not of speed but real interaction. Significantly, this sort of interactive sound was possible on radio without the distractions and masquerades of vision.

A radio listener is moved by a different aesthetics and kinaesthetics than that which constructs a CD ROM user. Pinned to their seat by the monitor, a user plays the CD ROM with twitchy mouse fingers, eager to move, so much to see and do. But maybe, yet again, more is less. Driven by the valorisation of speed as a pleasure (addiction) and as a technique in multimedia interactives, users experience less and less time for listening/contemplation. They feel less and less time for sound, with its capacity for a different sort of movement -- past the interface, through time, and into their bodies. And with this movement, a different sort of imaginative contact -- speaking directly and viscerally to the imagination. But in ROMland, why wouldn't you scamper about, when there is no irony of form to stop you in your tracks, and when there is no production (of a new medium) to engage your attention? There is instead a loud and glaring absence of any new genres and forms, of new ways of performing, recording, directing and designing. There is an absence in The Complete Maus of a form that fits Maus at the same time as writing and sounding it for a new medium.

Instead, the CD ROM imperative to Archive and to gain legitimacy and 'aura' through the Voice of the Author propels producers to agglomerate existing videos of performance with documentary interviews. This overrides a new medium's concern with developing its own genres, aesthetics and politics of production. What production for/in this new medium might be is still an open question, I would argue, in part because the tendency to treat it as defined by questions of the technology rather than to question the technology and work on and through questions of aesthetics and politics. And when the desire for sound is there, it will be possible. Possible to hear whether there is a new medium in CD ROMs. Meanwhile the masquerades are concealing the lack of this desire and inhibiting the development of it.