I wouldn't have thought about this had I not misread the word "entrance" in a moment of reading-context brain-deadness--also a pandemic-era problem.
My question about this possible connection--and with it, the possibility that entrances are intended to lead us to entrancement--led me to the Etymology Dictionary Online, where my theory crashed and burned.
entrance (n.)
1520s, "act of entering," from Middle French entrance, from entrer (see enter). Sense of "door, gate" first recorded in English 1530s. Meaning "a coming of an actor upon the stage" is from c. 1600.
My next step was to look at the etymology of "trance." What I found fascinated me:
late 14c., "state of extreme dread or suspense," also "a half-conscious or insensible condition, state of insensibility to mundane things," from Old French transe "fear of coming evil," originally "coma, passage from life to death" (12c.), from transir "be numb with fear," originally "die, pass on," from Latin transire "cross over, go over, pass over, hasten over, pass away," from trans "across, beyond" (see trans-) + ire "to go" (from PIE root *ei- "to go"). French trance in its modern sense has been reborrowed from English. As a music genre, from c. 1993.**
Not much to suggest delight here--and yet most people I know who would say that they were "entranced" by something would be speaking glowingly of whatever it was. I have to wonder how all these fear-, death-, and suspense-related etymological roots have led us 21st-century types to assign positive connotations to the verb "entrance." Are our daily lives generally so monotonous, so mundane, so stultifying that any experience of being transported out of them would be joyful? Suddenly, I'm thrust back to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire--the last stanzas of "Au Lecteur" and "Le Voyage": is ennui, a kind of listless boredom, so common an experience for us ("Au Lecteur")--especially during the pandemic--that we'd willingly journey anywhere to find something new ("Le Voyage") and captivating--even if that meant turning our fates over to Death, the captain of the ship.
Maybe death is always the captain of the ship.
But let's forget death for a few paragraphs. I still believe that though many of are dying to transcend ourselves and our daily realities, we're not ready to die.
And death's not the only way to escape. Still, if I couldn't go out walking these days and my life was limited to this dining table, depriving me of the chance, for example, to feel enchanted by the sunset I saw last night on Wollaston Beach, I might be willing to journey almost anywhere to change things up--not a good idea during a pandemic! But thankfully there's nature and walking, at least for some of us.
But wait--suddenly, I have to think about "entrance" and "enchant," since I'm starting to use those verbs synonymously, whether or not I should. Here's what the Etymology Online Dictionary has to say about "enchant."
late 14c., literal ("practice sorcery or witchcraft on") and figurative ("delight in a high degree, charm, fascinate"), from Old French enchanter "bewitch, charm, cast a spell" (12c.), from Latin incantare "to enchant, fix a spell upon," from in- "upon, into" (from PIE root *en "in") + cantare "to sing" (from PIE root *kan- "to sing"). Or perhaps a back-formation from enchantment.***
Much of the magical-supernatural to be found here, more than we find in the roots of "entrance" the verb. A little more potential for the benign and delightful. Here's my analysis:
- When we're entranced, we may actually be paralyzed literally, in some intense state of apprehension that we can't escape; particularly at the moment we realize we can't move though we'd like to, we experience fear and desperation. Imagine yourself frozen to the ground as you watch your first (and maybe your last) tornado barreling toward you . . .
- In contrast, when we're enchanted, we might at least temporarily revel in our powerlessness: during the many years I taught The Odyssey, my students always wanted to talk about how much Odysseus actually enjoyed his long stay with Kalypso. Yes, he pined for home, but all that sex with Kalypso might have taken the edge of his pain, they surmised.
Whatever we're experiencing, we like the idea of communicating our immersion in states of intense delight by using the words "entrance" and "enchant." It may be our tendency to exaggerate just how delighted we are, and I wonder about that, too: do we have too much need to convey how "peak" our peak experiences are--or does pandemic-era life make every "less narrow" experience feel like a peak experience in contrast to the routine narrowness of our days?
So what about the noun "entrance," which is partially responsible for my journey down these etymological rabbit holes today? As I look at the stage-related language in the etymological information, I realize that sometimes we're the ones making the entrances, and at other times, we're encountering the entrances of other people and other things into our lives--for example, the entrance of the blue heron we startle into flight because we didn't see him wading silently in shadows.
And then there's "entrance" as doorway--all those openings that beckon to us, and that we either walk by or pass through.
Other times, an entrance leads us into a place filled with challenge and adventure, even danger. In a blog post entitled "The Most Magical Doorways in Literature," Rose Moore talks about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy:
More doorways without literal doors, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is heavily influenced by the concept of other worlds and the possibility of doorways between them. The first such doorway appears at the end of the first book, The Golden Compass, when Lord Asriel blows apart the sky, creating a bridge between worlds. This dramatic creation is a one-off, however, and the (many) doorways that appear throughout the later books are made with the subtle knife – surgically cut between worlds, rather than roughly blasted through. The knife, wielded by Will Parry, can create a door to any other world – even into (and out of) the land of the dead.*****
With his permission, I post the comment my philosopher brother-in-law, Chris Ketcham, posted on my Facebook page. Thanks, Chris, for letting me post this!
ReplyDeleteWhen Dorothy’s house crashed into the Land of Oz, she pensively opens the door (entrance) to a bright colorful world, and she gasps (entrance). Thus begins an event of hospitality, The Abrahamic event of hospitality begins as the possi-bility for a utopia, Thomas More’s (1516) ‘perfect’ island society. The promise of hospitality is the possibility for a momentary utopia. However, as the OED al-so defines utopia, it is, “A plan for or vision of an ideal society, place, or state of existence, esp. one that is impossible to realize; a fantasy, a dream.” Alas, Doro-thy’s adventure is but a dream. Let us not also forget that More has Utopus estab-lished his utopia on an island. The Land of Oz makes such a promise of persis-tent utopia but this dissolves when Dorothy discovers its Utopus is a humbug. Therefore, we are obliged to consider the conjoinment of entrance and entrance in terms of threshold, and equally as uncertainty, whether its thrownness as into trance is something evil from which we cannot escape, or, like Dorothy requires both intellectual and physical effort to attain relief. We discover that both are possible in Dorothy’s adventure.
According to Fatima Vieria, Thomas More’s Utopia is both a “non-place” and a “good-place” (Vieria 2010, pp. 5). It is a place outside of time, but not outside of mind where it exists in the imagination as the possibility for something better, or as Ernest Bloch suggests, in the realm called “hope” (Vieria 2010, pp. 6). Therefore, the threshold of hospitality is both More’s island and Dorothy’s Oz in the realm of hope for something better. The threshold of hospitality is certainly a location—e.g. a transom, but its temporality is that of hope whose trajectory is towards the future but is otherwise outside of time.
Victor H. Matthews outlines the protocol of hospitality in Judges 4 of the Bi-ble. 1) There is a zone of hospitality (Matthews 1991, pp. 13). 2) “The stranger must be transformed from being a potential threat to becoming ally by the offer of hospitality” (Matthews 1991, pp. 14). 3) A Male head of household can offer hospitality, 4) there is a time limit to the hospitality, and 5) this offer can be re-fused (Matthews 1991, pp. 14). 6) the guest must not covet the possessions of the host, 7) “The guest remains under the protection of the host until he/she has left the zone of obligation of the host” (Matthews 1991, pp. 15). The host is respon-sible for the guest even to the detriment of the host in the zone of hospitality and the temporal duration of the hospitality event. In other words, as Derrida says, the host is hostage to the guest (Derrida 1999, pp. 56). There is both entrance (zone) and entrance (transformation of the stranger from threat to ally) in which there are utopian responsibilities of non-coveting and offering of the best. This entrance (trance) remains in place for both until the entrance (threshold is crossed by the guest on the way out). The ‘differance’ begins to emerge as these two differentially defined terms begin to orbit each other in ways that both em-phasizes their difference and blurs it. An interesting paradox indeed.
Abensour, M. (2008). Persistent Utopia. Constellations, 15(3), 406-421, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2008.00501.x.
Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (P.-A. Brault, & Michael Nals, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Matthews, V. H. (1991). Hospitality And Hostility In Judges 4. Biblical Theology Bulletin, 21(1), 13-21.
Vieria, F. (2010). The Concept of Utopia. In G. Claeys (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion To Utopian Literature (pp. 3-27). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.