Profanity as Intimacy

I. Vulgarity as a Password, Not a Symptom

A common assumption in both popular and critical reading is that profanity in fiction signals a breakdown — of composure, of civility, of relationship. James Mulhern’s fiction runs on the opposite principle almost without exception: profanity is the register his characters reserve specifically for the people they trust most, and its absence, rather than its presence, is what signals distance or danger. This essay traces that pattern closely enough to argue that it constitutes a deliberate sociolinguistic system, not an incidental feature of voice.

The clearest statement of the system’s logic comes, appropriately, from Nonna herself, correcting Molly’s directness with a borrowed line of poetry rather than an objection to profanity as such: “She had spoken with me a few weeks back about perceptions and how important it was for me to develop good interpersonal skills. She said that my directness was admirable, but others might perceive it as rudeness.”¹ Nonna’s objection is never to bluntness itself — she is, after all, the corpus’s most prolifically profane character — but to deploying that register with people who have not yet earned it. This is the essay’s organizing distinction: profanity aimed at family is affection; profanity aimed at strangers is a social risk Nonna actively coaches her granddaughter to manage.

II. Nonna’s Profanity as a Love Language

Nonna’s cursing is inseparable from her tenderness throughout the story cycle, frequently occurring in the very same sentence as an endearment, so that the two registers reinforce rather than contradict each other. Describing her relationship with Mr. Scarfone, she tells Molly, without embarrassment or hesitation, “Oh, he’s just a good fuck,” and when Molly reacts with shock, Nonna “whacked me playfully with the bag of fruit and Italian bread she had brought,” a gesture of physical affection delivered in the same breath as the vulgarity.² The scene repeats, nearly verbatim, later in the volume, which is itself significant: Mulhern does not treat this joke as a single comic beat but as a stable feature of how Nonna and Molly relate to each other, worth restating because it is characteristic rather than exceptional.²

The pattern holds even at Nonna’s most protective and most frightened. Fleeing Lady Jane’s parlor after the “Angel of Death” prophecy, Nonna’s parting words are pure profanity — “Ffangul’!” — and Molly, absorbing her grandmother’s register in the moment of greatest anxiety, silently mouths “Fuck you” back at the healer.³ The grandmother and granddaughter share a private linguistic register in this scene precisely because they are frightened together; the profanity is the sound their intimacy makes under pressure, not a breakdown of the relationship but a demonstration of how completely aligned the two of them are in that moment.

III. Nana’s Restraint as the System’s Negative Space

“A Bath” supplies the essay’s most important control case, because Nana is markedly less profane than Nonna, and the essay argues this is not a difference in the two grandmothers’ capacity for intimacy but a difference in what kind of intimacy each scene requires. Nana’s one moment of registered vulgarity arrives exactly where the story’s emotional stakes are highest, when she learns her daughter has been hit: she does not curse at the man who did it, or curse in anger at all; instead, her profanity is reserved for the earlier, lesser offense of her son’s absence and his wife’s falseness — “Darlene’s a phony through and through. Even her body is fake. I know those breasts aren’t real”⁴ — leaving her response to the actual disclosure of violence to occur in a register of plain tenderness rather than profanity: “You’re not that horrible word, Gracie. You’re opinionated and strong.”⁴

This distinction matters for the essay’s argument: profanity in Mulhern’s fiction marks casual, comic, everyday intimacy (Nonna’s register with Molly, Nana’s register describing her daughter-in-law) but is withheld at moments of the gravest emotional disclosure, replaced by a plainer, more careful diction. Billy’s own single profanity in the story — “You fucked him, didn’t you?”, asked of his mother about the father he has never known — earns him an immediate slap, the story’s only instance of profanity producing rupture rather than intimacy.⁴ The exception proves the rule with unusual precision: Billy’s crudeness fails because he has aimed an intimate register at a subject — his mother’s trauma, delivered as accusation rather than solidarity — that the relationship has not yet metabolized into shared, comic, protective vulgarity the way Nonna and Molly have metabolized Mr. Scarfone’s sexual prowess or Lady Jane’s fraudulence.

IV. A Register Reserved for Love

Taken together, the two grandmothers demonstrate a single, consistent system: profanity in James Mulhern’s fiction is not a marker of class, education, or moral looseness, and it is not primarily comic relief, though it frequently produces comedy as a side effect. It is a register of trust, deployed almost exclusively among people whose relationship can absorb it without damage, and withheld or punished precisely at the moments when a character reaches for it before that trust has been fully established or when a subject is too raw to survive the register’s casualness. Nonna curses constantly and lovingly; Nana curses rarely and carefully; Billy curses once, prematurely, and is slapped for it. The pattern across these three cases suggests that Mulhern has built vulgarity into his fiction as a precise instrument for measuring intimacy, one that a careful reader can use, scene by scene, to gauge exactly how much trust two characters have actually earned with each other — a claim no character in the fiction states outright, but one the fiction’s own dialogue proves on nearly every page it appears.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Grammar of Interruption Domestic Violence and Silence