A wide-ranging literary essay, what Joyce dubs a "theoretical narrative," surveying the desire for media "transparency," an ideal that retains its allure even after philosophers and theorists have revealed its illusoriness.
Transparency on the one hand is not to be read aesthetically, and on the other it is how we read something as having an aesthetic dimension. Hiding is disclosing, disclosing hiding, and a gap or its lack alike is a gap.
On its face I think we are inclined to think well of the word 'transparency' at least in its musicality, its traversal softened by the lapsing (if not lisping) sound of the sea at its end, the 'para' rising above its center in a billow and gently drifting down.