JACTITATION, n., also jactation. I’ve been reading the work of Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges again. In one translation (Douglas Crockford’s), I ran across this word, “jactitation,” for Spanish “jactancia,” which I think is more usually translated as “boasting.”
“Jactitation” has the same meaning in English, but it’s a rare enough word that right now my spell check is underlining it in red. It also has a particular medical usage: “A restless tossing of the body: a symptom of distress in severe diseases” (that’s the OED). The connection between boasting and restless distress was obscure to me until I looked up the Latin verb at the root of all this, iactō. I think you can trace a sort of figurative evolution through Wiktionary’s listed definitions:
to throw, cast, hurl; to scatter, toss; to utter, speak, throw out; to hurl insults; to be officious or active in, to devote oneself to a thing; to boast, act conceitedly, be officious, show off, display, parade, throw one’s weight around, make oneself conspicuous, flaunt oneself.
Additionally, the -to in “iactō” (which becomes the “-it-” in the middle of “jactitation”) is something in Latin called a “frequentative” form. The standard verb for “throw” is iaciō. Latin speakers could add to a verb to indicate that someone was doing that action all the time. You can see how a verb for “boast” might need that extra information.
English also used to have frequentative forms, by the way. For us, they sound like “blab” becoming “blabber,” or “chat” becoming “chatter,” or “daze” becoming “dazzle.” I highly recommend reading this list of English words. It’s one of the most charming lists on Wikipedia, and that’s really saying something.
In Capital-R Romance, I’m going to talk (chatter, blabber) about Borges now. In the past few days, I spent a lot of time thinking (thinkering?) about a short piece he published in 1942 called “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” I read it in Spanish, very badly, and then in a few different English translations. It’s about language and systems and categories, but is itself appropriately uncategorizable: an essay with an embedded work of fiction; a serious comment, but also a joke; a hope, but a sigh.
John Wilkins was a real 17th-century English philosopher, and he really did propose an “analytical language,” a universal language that scholars of any nation could use to communicate, or as Borges puts it, a “language that would organize and contain all human thought” (thanks to this nameless translator, whose name I wish was appended to that PDF). Here’s what Borges wants you to know about the system:
Wilkins divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then subdivisible into differences, subdivisible in turn into species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame.
This is, as far as I can tell, an accurate representation. Borges then dedicates some time to highlighting the flaws in the forty categories. He turns his eye to the arbitrary divisions and insufficiencies of this system and another invented language, that of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando. He critiques the system of the now-defunct Bibliographical Institute of Brussels. These things all existed. A few other things Borges cites are real, like passages from David Hume and G. K. Chesterton.
But the most famous part of “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” is made up.
It’s a taxonomy of animals that Borges claims is from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia that he encountered in the work of German translator Franz Kuhn. To further muddy the waters: Kuhn was real, and he really did translate Chinese literature into German—just not this particular encyclopedia, since Borges made it up. Here’s the passage (thanks again, nameless translator):
On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
What a puzzle. What a little prose poem. An impossible labyrinth. Are the Emperor’s animals not trained? You think it falls apart when “suckling pigs” seems too specific, but then you hit “mermaids,” and the whole thing really explodes at “those that are included in this classification.” “Others”! Sure okay! Temporary, arbitrary, contradictory, unknowable—but wonderful. Borges is making his point that “there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.”
Damn. You got me, Jorge Luis. I mean, obviously I don’t know what the universe is, but I was sort of hoping someone did. Here comes John Wilkins with his attempt, as futile as all the rest, as ridiculous—but admirable, says Borges. Ingenious. “If there is [a universe],” he writes in the nameless translator’s version, “we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God’s secret dictionary.”
What a Borges notion, the secret dictionary of God: infinite, inaccessible writing that explains everything, in which every word contains within itself the past and the future, “all the details of its destiny.” The text exists, but you will never read it. You couldn’t read it, not without irrevocably changing yourself and ceasing to be human.
But here’s where I got caught up: “etymologies.” You know, that thing where, because we’re human and we switch our words around all the time, invent them and borrow them and mispronounce them and use them in unexpected ways, we made a whole study (-ology) of figuring out a word’s root (etym-). What’s God need that for? Is God doing language change all by Godself? Isn’t every term in God’s all-encompassing language impossibly, perfectly transparent?
I think, rather, that Borges loved etymology so much that imagining God’s secret dictionary without it—the very best part of the dictionary!—would have been a crushing disappointment to him, as it would to me. Andrew Hurley, a famous translator of Borges, has written about Borges’s careful evocation of etymology as a hallmark of his prose in this marvelous essay (the hyperlink on “splendid” is my annotation):
In “The Dead Man” there is a “splendid” woman: Her red hair glows; indeed, I believe that in Borges, splendid always has either the etymological sense of glowing or the sense only slightly metaphorized from that, of glorious. […] Borges used the technique of what I’ve called etymologized words as a way of cutting through the baroque, trimming it down, not perpetuating it — as a way of making an efficient writing, packing a great deal of meaning into the story by freighting words with not just dictionary meaning, but their entire historical significance.
“Their entire historical significance,” because human words do contain their past, and etymology is our way of uncovering it. The study is never perfectly systematic. It’s full of gaps and dead ends. Every word is marked by the generations of human lips and hands that have shaped it. We can find traces, fragments. Accordingly, etymology ranges from straightforward to labyrinthine. Often obscure and chaotic, or tantalizing but unreliable. That’s what I love about it. And of course Borges loved it, too: a word within the word, a secret message, a half-remembered dream, a found text, a lifetime unfolding in a frozen instant.
And here I return to “jactitation,” the word that sent me down this path. I hesitated over Crockford’s translation choice. Sometimes it’s considered bad form in translation to stick too close to cognates, especially when it produces a word like “jactitation,” something even a native English speaker like me needs to look up. Spanish “jactancia,” as far as I can tell, doesn’t have that effect. It’s just a regular word. Boasting. Every other translation I investigated had taken that route—boast, swagger, bragging. Then again, Borges does love an etymological connection, and a little linguistic shock, and “jactitation” is fun as hell. This isn’t a question with a right answer. There’s value in the strangeness (the restless tossing!) of jactitation, and there’s value in the simplicity of boast or swagger or bragging. You can wander this labyrinth endlessly.
I understand yearning for a straighter path, though. If John Wilkins had succeeded in his analytical language—if anyone had—if we had a more organized, logical system, we could find our way through. We could communicate everything with clarity. Borges ends his essay with a sigh of despair from G. K. Chesterton:
Hopes and utopias aside, these words by Chesterton are perhaps the most lucid ever written about language:
Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. (G. F. Watts, 1904, p. 88)
Writers bemoan the limits of language so eloquently. Isn’t this a kind of jactitation, both restless tossing and arrogance? There isn’t one right word, but there are versions upon versions. See how I am trapped here, cut off from the infinite, and yet still I search for it. We do not know what the universe is. No taxonomy can contain it. Language fails us. There is so much that can never be communicated or understood. But in my prison, two minutes from my execution, I perform miracles.
And what need would exist for writers, if language were perfect? What mystery would there be? Wouldn’t it be a loss, if nothing were lost? If there were no secrets to be discovered? Wouldn’t you miss the work? I would. I love the cracked, the fragmented, the obscure, the apocryphal.
The Boston Public Library doesn’t give me access to God’s secret dictionary, anyway.
Here’s to our imperfect attempts—flawed, inadequate, chaotic, arbitrary, doomed—to express ourselves, our experiences, our universe. It can’t be done; it must be done. Let’s dig into our present words to unearth their pasts, piling more meaning on our meanings. Let’s say it again another way. How else would we make the future? Here we are, all of us included in this classification: stray, fabulous, trembling, innumerable, others, the ones who have just broken the vase, the ones beating the cracked cauldron, making marks that from a distance look like flies. Grunting and squealing and human.
To be clear: this newsletter is fully in favor of expressing the agonies of desire in grunts and squeals. Just one small-r romance this time, but when it’s this good, you only need one:
D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary) by Chencia C. Higgins. I’ve said in previous reviews that I don’t cry that often when I read, but I’m gonna have to stop saying that because this book made me break out the tissues twice—once during a coming-out scene about a third of the way in, and once at the end. D’Vaughn is a Black lesbian who has never come out to her mother because after being raised in the church, she’s afraid of being rejected. To force herself to come out, she goes on the reality show Instant I Do, in which contestants pair up and convince their families they’re getting married in six weeks. Couples who make it the whole six weeks can split up at the altar and win $100,000 each—or get married, which nobody has ever done. D’Vaughn’s only real goal in going on the show is to finally come out, but she gets paired with Kris, a sexy Afrolatina stud who is actually looking for the love of her life. They have instant, incredible chemistry, and it’s surprisingly easy to convince their families that they’re in love. For D’Vaughn, the hardest thing is to convince herself that Kris really loves her. Everything about this is so much fun, from Kris’s huge, loving, very queer family to D’Vaughn’s banter with her best friend to the interstitial chapters written like reality-show confessionals to D’Vaughn and Kris’s genuine romance. This book has such a big heart. I also appreciated that while D’Vaughn and her mother love each other deeply, their relationship is complicated by the decades D’Vaughn spent in the closet, afraid her mom didn’t love her unconditionally. Coming out doesn’t instantly fix everything; it’s just the beginning. That, like everything else about this book, was gorgeously written.
(I’ve stopped doing content guidance in this newsletter; I try to describe books as best I can, and of course if you ever have a specific question, please ask! But I will mention here, since this is my particular deal, that this book has a pregnant supporting character and a big scene at a baby shower. Everyone is fine and nothing goes wrong, but happy pregnancy stuff was hard to read when I was dealing with my own unhappy pregnancy stuff. Nobody ever seems to warn for it. So there you go.)
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read the latest in entry in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, System Collapse. This series is some of my favorite science fiction, funny and warm and action-packed and always asking in new ways what it means to be a person. If you like the other titles, you will like this one. For those who have read it already, in typical romance reader fashion I am dying to know if Tarik and Ratthi are gonna work things out, but of course SecUnit doesn’t care to find out. Anyway, in the interest of keeping this newsletter to a manageable (?) length, I won’t go on, but I have mentioned Murderbot previously here, here, and (at greater length) here.
And I read Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr, translated from Arabic by Marcia Lynx Qualey, which is a folklore-inspired novel following the adventures of a clever, bookish Palestinian woman as she joins caravans crossing the desert, gets abducted into slavery and storytells her way into advising an Egyptian princess, studies with a scholar in Tangier, disguises herself as a man to join a pirate crew, becomes a doctor, has doomed romances, becomes a mother, and searches the world for her lost family. I think this book is sort of writing back to Ibn Battuta, but I haven’t read his travel memoirs so I don’t know; either way, I really enjoyed the fantastical feel of it—so many calamities, chance encounters, and larger-than-life characters. At a few moments, this book was a little bit unkind about fat people, and I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it as much if I’d been right in the thick of my fertility issues, but it was otherwise captivating. Plus, it starts with a prologue where a narrator attends a conference in modern Tangier and happens upon a strange set of old scrolls, which naturally comprise the rest of the book. I always love a frame story. Plus, within the embedded story, the main character continually re-encounters a book entitled Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and obviously I’m wild about that. It reminds me of Borges.
Since I have failed to unlock a power over time, this newsletter is not arriving in your inbox on Sunday, January 21, 2024, a date that is now as inaccessible to all of us as the remotest past. Though I don’t know all the details of my destiny, it remains my hope that the next one will arrive on Sunday, February 4, depending on where you find yourself in our labyrinth of earthly time zones.
