“The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity. Because the writer entering the dense mass of his writings renounces an absolute, his poetic invention, full of self-evidence + sublimity. Writing’s relation to that absolute is relative: that is it actually renders it opaque by realizing it in language. The text passes from a dreamed-of-transparency to the opacity produced in words.” (Transparency + Opacity, Édourd Glissant p. 115)
There are different relational scales to consider transparency and opacity. For Édourd Glissant, he’s writing of and on behalf of a Caribbean resistance to Otherness. Transparency in this context is a means to capture, to contain, to then, in turn, enslave the oppressed in perpetuity. Being for opacity, then, is a means to resist this kind of thingifcation; if you cannot be detected, or understood, then you will not be subjected to any kind of box waiting to be checked.
There are great demands for transparency in relationship to who holds power: we want to know what leaders are doing with their power because we already know what they have done and will not do with their power.
People employ language differently and cunningly so as to evade demands for clarity. What do you want? What do you need? Someone says one thing, but means another to someone else. Without a shared vocabulary and a shared application of a shared vocabulary, these become impossible questions to answer. They become impossible only insofar as transparency becomes a required outcome of any interaction: if I fully know you then I can fully trust you. If I fully know the literary text then I can fully trust the literary text.
This understanding, in this context, on opacity is, almost ironically, clear. The quote’s subject is “the literary text” as it is the vehicle for the delivery of opacity. (Note from Lisa Robertson: “Glissant’s typology of 3 opacities — the text, the reader, and the social collective, all mixed together in shifting proportions.” Right now we are focusing on the opacity of the text as it is received by the reader.) What’s conjured in dreams is immediately made diffuse once we wake up. So we make attempts to recall, to represent what was once so clear in slumber, what was so clear while walking past the same rock over and over again. It’s exciting, it’s arousing, to get a little close to representing a dream, or thoughts on a walk, even when it's so far from its source - the unconscious.
What are the ways words like opacity and density are used as in the pejorative? Poetry is often lauded in this way before a relationship with any text is even considered, dismissed for its difficulty, its challenge to transparency, its opacity, its density. Poetry is the ultimate concatenating tool, method, expression for this contradiction between opacity and transparency, because it be/labours over meaning and expression with something as ordinary (transparent) and affectively charged (opaque) as language. Anyone can write or speak a poem. Its opacity is available; its density ready. The poem’s audience is for those special social subjects who can and want to share in a willingness to reside in the contradiction who can and want to replace words like dense, that mean difficult, for words like dream, that mean lets walk together.