Deformative fictions confront rhetorical readers with a fundamentally subtractive experience. They strip away the reassurances of reading, confronting us instead with varied disruptions to our efforts to enter, interpret, and exit narrative worlds. Ocampo''s stories block access to character interiority, embarrass us when we hunt for depths, and expose the impulse toward empathy as fundamentally self-serving rather than benevolent. Her defensive project shields characters and texts from our projections and impositions. At the same time, ambiguous and often-opaque scenarios position readers as co-authors of cruelty. We often end up reading cruelty "into" the very stories where empathic access has been blocked. Vallejo''s La virgen saturates narrative with cruelty, not only in the novel''s celebration of death, but even more so in the narrator''s evacuation of meaning from the suffering of others, including his teen lovers. Yet another dimension of cruelty in the telling emerges in Vallejo''s layered assault on targeted readers, an assault conducted for the delight and appreciation of an authorial audience who shares Vallejo''s scorn for liberal humanism.

La virgen hijacks the narrative resources of fiction in an elegant and disturbing bid to maximize the duration of targeted readers'' exposure to afflictive diatribe. In 2666 , Bolaño rejects readers'' desire to process, interpret, feel past, or otherwise handle cruelty, both literary and factual. This obstruction persists across the novel''s many pages, but it finds its most salient expression in the accounts of the murders of women on the US-Mexico border. Bolaño''s anti-elegiac project tempts us to seek literary redemption, as if art might repair the experiences it represents, only to refuse that consolation more forcefully. He leaves us with the heavy burden of witnessing without resolution, mourning without release or relief. Deformative fictions make plain the limits of extracting ethical, moral, or psychological insights from our reading. They suggest that there is much to learn from unlovely voices. In their difficulty, they improve our listening out of necessity.

Deformative fictions typically demand that we attend to the text closely and scrutinize the preconceptions and schema we bring to it. We learn to contend with, rather than count out, the kind of information or detail that we previously might have ignored. The unlovely voices of deformative fictions also remind us that, too often, we listen only to those voices that speak as we wish. When I argue for the intentional reading of deformative fictions, I often encounter dear and wise readers who cannot comprehend why anyone would choose to be distressed or frustrated by a text. I do not know that I can convince these readers, but I try. Readers reluctant to approach deformative fictions may benefit from considering the privilege of being able to choose whether to walk a difficult road. They might reflect on the contrasting experience of those who suffer in the present or live with the trauma of past harm. What would change if we were to register, alongside our discomfort in reading, the real wounds of intergenerational injustice, structural oppression, systematic disenfranchisement and disposition, and the unfolding aftermath of enslavement and colonialism? It is worth remembering that those who suffer such harms do not have the luxury of choosing, or not choosing, their burdens.

In my view, readers with the good fortune to be able to shield themselves from hardship also have a responsibility to develop at least some of the skills to contend with unwanted difficulty. In so doing, we bridge from struggle to wisdom, endurance, insight, strategy, and whatever understanding can come from challenge and distress. We shift the focus to appreciating the experience of discomfort, not rushing past it. Reading deformative fictions is an available, albeit incomplete, opportunity to consider the costs of real-life afflictions that we have allowed to become part of our human condition.