ABSTRACT
All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Jenny Holzer's canvases might be called unnarrative painting, in the sense that narratologist Gerald Prince has given to "the category of the unnarratable": That which, according to a narrative, cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating either because it transgresses a law or because it defies the powers of a particular narrator or because it falls below the so-called threshold of narratability. Formally, the contrast and counterbalance of suffering and satisfaction are produced by W. H. Auden's imagistic juxtaposition of scenes from at least two of Breughel's other paintings: Hunters in the Snow, in which children skate far away from an untidy corner, and The Massacre of Innocents, in which children are butchered by soldiers, whose innocent horses scratch themselves against trees. Thus, the vanishing point sits at both the endpoint and source of a painting.
