Quote 21
“At least fifteen foreign editions are coming out. I’ve gotten 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or a movie.” (II.2.31)
Art resists adaptations of his work into more popular forms, and he’s ambivalent about the success of the book. The concern that he might be exploiting the Holocaust in any way is constantly on his mind.
Quote 22
“There’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize. I mean, reality is too complex for comics…so much has to be left out or distorted.” (II.1.6)
In representing his father’s Holocaust experience, Art faces a quandary: 1) comics can’t represent reality as accurately as other media (say, photography or film, for example); 2) the Holocaust is unrepresentably horrible, so any representation is a failure.
Quote 23
“Anyway, the victims who died can never tell their side of the story, so maybe it’s better not to have any more stories.” (II.2.35)
Art confronts another problem in representing the Holocaust: the victims never get to tell their stories. Without their stories, the bigger story of the Holocaust is always going to be one-sided, slanted toward the perpetrators and the survivors.
Quote 24
“Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’” (II.2.35)
As Art points out, Beckett had to say those words. That is, words are necessary to explain that words are unnecessary. These words help explain Art’s ambivalence toward writing about the Holocaust. In the face of such a tragedy, is every word an “unnecessary stain”?