The Rebellious Profanity of Katherine Dunn

How does language speak truth to power? More specifically, how can language be used to rebel against power? The protagonists of Katherine Dunn’s three novels — 1969’s Attic, 1971’s Truck, and 1989’s Geek Love — are all positioned on the outskirts of society, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. (Dunn also wrote extensively about boxing: her 2009 book One Ring Circus collected her nonfiction about the sport, and her unfinished novel The Cut Man bears a title that alludes to the sport.) At the time of her death in 2016, Geek Love had been a cult classic for decades. In a lengthy article exploring its influence for Wired, Caitlin Roper called it “a dazzling oddball masterpiece.” She’s not wrong. It’s a novel that was nominated for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, and that juxtaposition speaks volumes about Dunn’s aesthetic even if you haven’t read a word she’s written.

Now entering the world is a new book from Dunn: On Cussing, which has its origins in a lecture that Dunn gave to the Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. There’s a steady growth in the number of lectures-turned-books in the world today. Some, like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel lecture My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs, serve as a quick introduction to the author’s craft; others, like David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water and Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters, read…