BJ Silcox

I think that's an extraordinary point to make.

And part of the centre of my essay is arguing that.

I love The Sun.

I think it's a wonderful novel, one of my favourite novels of the year when it came out.

And for precisely that reason, that the suffering that we see in that novel is

is given historical context, historical weight, historical explanation.

And because of that, we're asked to make meaning from it in a way that has implications for how we think about ourselves in the world.

And it was also quite hard to read at times, wasn't it?

Again, very explicit, very ornate.

And I think one of the things that sort of brings this together as an aesthetic movement is the aestheticisation of the violence.

And that's sort of what separates it out from what we see in misery literature is

When we bring it into the literature we see in bookstores, the literature that's on the fiction bestseller list, what we're seeing is violence that's both made intense and made beautiful.

But I was able to see my purpose in that as a reader.

My purpose was to stare down a history that had been for a long time a forgotten history, to contextualise it with what I knew about the West and what I knew about

the American sort of colonialization of the West and the complexities of that story that hadn't been explored before.

In the novels that made me so uncomfortable, the violence was almost hermetically sealed.

It was in a vacuum and we don't know when it starts and we don't understand how it finishes and we're just asked to sort of sit inside of it.

The violence is the thing that pushes the plot onwards.

The trauma is the driver of the narrative.

When you endure it, your reward is to understand exactly how broken the person is, is not to understand their context, is not to understand what might be done or its place in history.