Who writes Borges?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Borges writes Borges.

Yet literary theory has long argued that things are not so simple.

One of the central contributions of narratology is to distinguish between figures that readers often collapse into one. We tend to assume that the person whose name appears on the cover is the same person speaking inside the text. But this is rarely true.

The first distinction is between the empirical author and the author.

The empirical Borges is the historical individual: the man born in Buenos Aires in 1899, the lecturer, the traveler, the reader of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the public intellectual who died in Geneva in 1986.

But once we open a book, that Borges disappears.

The Borges who constructs stories is not identical to the historical person. Literature is not testimony. A literary work cannot be reduced to the virtues, flaws, opinions, or experiences of the individual who produced it. The author creates an artifact whose meaning exceeds biography.

A second distinction is between the author and the narrator.

The narrator is the voice that speaks within the text. Sometimes the narrator resembles the author. Sometimes he does not. Sometimes he even bears the author’s name. Yet from a literary perspective, the narrator remains a construction of the text.

This is where Borges becomes particularly interesting.

In stories such as The Aleph, the narrator is called “Borges.” Many readers therefore conclude that Borges is simply recounting events from his own life. But literary theory asks us to resist that temptation. The narrator called Borges is still a literary figure, a character created by the author.

The situation becomes even more complex because Borges frequently introduces additional narrative layers. Characters tell stories. Other characters quote them. Manuscripts appear inside stories. Narrators become characters and characters become narrators. Borges builds labyrinths not only of time and space, but also of voice.

The same complexity appears on the receiving end.

Who is being addressed?

There is the actual reader. But there may also be an implied reader, an imagined interlocutor, or even characters within the text who function as recipients of particular statements. Literary communication operates simultaneously on several levels.

So far, the theory seems straightforward.

Then we encounter Borges y yo.

Ackerman argues that the text creates difficulties for these distinctions. At first sight, it certainly does.

The opening sentence introduces two figures: the public Borges and the private “I.” One is the celebrated writer whose name appears in encyclopedias. The other is the intimate self who walks through Buenos Aires and experiences life.

The distinction appears clear.

Yet as the text unfolds, the boundaries begin to blur.

Who is speaking?

Who is being spoken about?

Who writes the final sentence?

At first, I accepted this reading. But after rereading the text, I have come to a different conclusion.

Far from being a challenge to narratology, Borges y yo seems to me one of its most elegant demonstrations.

Ackerman follows the standard theoretical position: strictly speaking, the empirical Borges can never enter the text. The moment the empirical Borges appears on the page, he becomes a literary construction, a character created by the author.

I understand the argument. Yet I am not entirely persuaded.

Why should the empirical Borges be excluded in principle from becoming a character in a text written by Borges himself?

After all, Borges was not merely a private individual. He was also a public figure, a cultural icon, someone whose public existence could itself become literary material. Shakespeare appears in literature. Napoleon appears in literature. Cervantes appears in literature.

The distinction remains useful, but perhaps it should not be treated as absolute.

What Borges y yo does is not collapse the distinction between author, narrator, and character. Rather, it places pressure on the boundary separating them.

Borges the author creates a narrator who presents himself as Borges the private self and reflects upon another figure: Borges the public writer.

In other words, Borges the author constructs a narrator who tells a story about the relationship between Borges the private man and Borges the literary figure.

Far from dissolving the distinctions proposed by narratology, the text depends on them.

The famous final sentence does not abolish the categories. It activates them.

The question is not psychological.

It is structural.

Who writes this page?

The narrator?

The public Borges?

The author who created them both?

The brilliance of the text lies precisely in making all three answers seem plausible at once.

For that reason, I increasingly think that Borges y yo is not a refutation of narratology. It is one of its finest literary demonstrations.

Borges does not destroy the distinction between author, narrator, and character.

He turns that distinction into literature.

And perhaps that is one reason why Borges continues to generate new interpretations forty years after his death. He does not merely invite interpretation.

He makes interpretation itself one of his subjects.

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

Recently, I read Viviana Ackerman’s remarkable book El Divino Desorden: Claves para Leer a Borges. In chapter 4, Ackerman offers what one might call the learned reading of “The Aleph.”

The Aleph is connected to the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Kabbalistic traditions, the aleph contains the other letters in potential form; it is the beginning from which the world and its possible interpretations unfold. In Borges’s story, that symbolic density becomes literary: the Aleph is a point that contains all points, a figure of infinity, but also of eternity, because it abolishes the ordinary succession of time. Everything is seen at once.

That is why the two epigraphs with which Borges opens the story matter. The first, from Shakespeare, evokes the impossibility of fully grasping what is contained in the world; the second, from Hobbes, introduces the problem of eternity and time. Before the story even begins, Borges has already placed us before the two great difficulties that will govern the tale: how to imagine totality, and how to narrate simultaneity with a language that can only proceed one word after another.

Ackerman’s analysis is rich, sophisticated, and persuasive. Much of it is undoubtedly correct.

Yet Borges himself might have been the first to warn us against believing that any interpretation could ever exhaust a great text.

Throughout his life Borges insisted that books change because readers change. A work survives not because it contains a fixed meaning, but because different readers continue to discover different meanings in it. Every rereading is, in a sense, a new book.

That observation became particularly vivid to me during my latest encounter with “The Aleph,” which happened shortly after I had been reading about another aleph: Cantor’s aleph.

In Amir Aczel’s The Mystery of the Aleph, we encounter the extraordinary history of Georg Cantor’s notation ℵ, the symbol he introduced to describe transfinite numbers. Cantor’s great discovery was that infinity is not a single undifferentiated vastness. There are different infinities, different magnitudes of the infinite. Mathematics did not retreat before infinity. It attempted to classify it, understand it, and give it names.

The connection with Borges seems almost inevitable.

Both men spent their lives circling the boundaries of human understanding. Cantor sought to think the infinite. Borges sought to imagine it.

Seen from this perspective, “The Aleph” appears to be one more variation on Borges’s lifelong fascination with totality. The Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Whoever sees it sees everything. Past and present. Near and distant. The entire universe revealed simultaneously.

This is, more or less, the Borges that critics have been discussing for decades.

But this time something else caught my attention.

In Hebrew, the letter aleph suggests another association:

א של אהבה

Aleph of love.

I do not mean this as a philological argument. I mean it as a reading.

Suppose, for a moment, that we read “The Aleph” not primarily as a story about infinity and eternity, but as a story about love.

What happens?

Curiously, almost nothing in the plot changes.

The narrator is not searching for metaphysical truth. He is mourning Beatriz Viterbo. Everything begins with her death. The annual visits to her house, the preservation of her memory, the conversations with Carlos Argentino Daneri, the eventual discovery of the Aleph itself—all of it originates in a failed love.

The story does not begin with infinity.

It begins with grief.

And then comes the decisive moment.

Borges sees everything.

The entire universe unfolds before him.

Yet what remains emotionally central is not the universe itself.

It is Beatriz.

More precisely, it is the discovery that Beatriz was not the idealized figure preserved by memory. Through the Aleph, Borges learns something intimate and painful about her. The beloved becomes human. The ideal collapses. The Aleph reveals not a cosmic secret but a personal wound.

That detail has always been present in the story. But only recently did it strike me as the true center of gravity.

Think about the extraordinary asymmetry involved.

Borges grants the narrator -Borges- access to absolute totality and yet chooses to make the emotional climax of the story a revelation about the woman the narrator loved.

Now, the Aleph becomes the setting.

The real drama remains human.

This strikes me as one of Borges’s deepest insights.

Human beings do not cease being human merely because they encounter something larger than themselves.

Cantor teaches us that there are different sizes of infinity.

Borges suggests something less mathematical and perhaps more unsettling: when granted everything, we still turn toward someone.

The universe may be infinite.

The heart is not.

It chooses, remembers, wounds itself, returns.

Borges’s narrator is offered totality, and yet the emotional order of the story remains organized around Beatriz.

Perhaps this is why great books survive.

They are not exhausted by the interpretations of critics, however illuminating those interpretations may be. They continue to generate new readings because readers themselves change. We return to the same text carrying different experiences, different losses, different hopes.

The Aleph I read twenty years ago was a story about infinity and eternity.

The Aleph I read today is a story about love.

Both readings might be true.

Indeed, Borges would probably insist that neither excludes the other.

Forty years after his death, critics continue to explore the labyrinths of his metaphysics, his theology, his aesthetics, and his philosophy of language. They should. There is immense richness there.

Yet this time, after closing the story, I found myself thinking less about infinity than about Beatriz.

A man is granted the impossible privilege of contemplating the entire universe.

And still he turns toward the woman he loved.

That, too, is Borges.

References

Ackerman, Viviana. El Divino Desorden: Claves para Leer a Borges. Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual / Eudeba.

Aczel, Amir D. The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.

Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1949.

Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers. New York: Dover Publications, 1955 (original works 1895–1897).

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

The autobiography is not a conventional memoir. Borges was incapable of writing a merely documentary account of himself. Even when recounting facts, he seems less interested in chronology than in destiny. Events matter not simply because they happened, but because they reveal the hidden pattern of a life. Reading the essay, one has the feeling that Borges is trying to understand how a shy child from Buenos Aires became Borges.

And perhaps even more strangely: how that child had already been Borges from the beginning.

The center of his childhood was not the city, but a library.

Again and again, Borges returns to the library of his father. Later he would say that if he had to name the chief event of his life, he would name his father’s library. He also said that he never really left it. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer, a teacher of psychology, and above all a reader. The family home contained thousands of English-language books. Borges learned English before Spanish. Stevenson, Dickens, Wells, and the Bible entered his imagination before Cervantes.

This matters enormously for understanding him. Borges never became entirely a Spanish or Argentine writer in the conventional sense. From childhood onward, he belonged simultaneously to several traditions. Argentina gave him emotional geography and mythology; English literature gave him narrative discipline, concision, understatement, and metaphysical adventure.

Even as a child, he seems to have lived more intensely in literature than in reality. He recalls reading the Quixote in English before reading it in Spanish and later discovering, almost with surprise, that the original differed from the translation. The anecdote is profoundly revealing. Borges’s universe was one in which texts did not possess stable hierarchies. Originals and translations, dreams and realities, authors and readers constantly flowed into one another.

Blindness also entered his life early, long before he lost his sight. His father suffered from the hereditary eye condition that Borges himself would later inherit. In retrospect, this gives his childhood memories a strange tenderness. The boy wandering through infinite books already belongs partly to darkness.

Then came Europe.

The Borges family moved to Geneva during the First World War, partly because of his father’s eye treatment. Borges studied there during adolescence and discovered another intellectual universe. Geneva became one of the sacred cities of his imagination. He learned French and German. He read Arthur Schopenhauer in German while still very young. He encountered expressionism and the European avant-garde.

One sometimes forgets how modern and experimental the young Borges initially was. The later Borges, master of lucid classical prose, can make us overlook the fact that he emerged from the violent atmosphere of the avant-garde. He embraced Ultraism, rejected ornament, celebrated metaphor, and dreamed of renewing the Spanish language.

Yet the most important event of those European years may have been his return to Buenos Aires.

Borges often described that return almost as a revelation. The city he rediscovered after Europe seemed both familiar and dreamlike. Buenos Aires became for him less a physical city than a metaphysical landscape. He began inventing the Buenos Aires that would later populate his poems and stories: patios, twilight streets, knife fighters, anonymous courage, forgotten corners of Palermo.

Much of the early Borges consists of constructing the mythology of a city that perhaps never fully existed.

His first major book, Fervor de Buenos Aires, appeared in 1923. Borges later claimed he would not change a line of it, though one suspects the statement was partly affectionate irony. The book already contains many of his permanent themes: mirrors, patios, sunset, memory, time, the emotional infinity hidden within ordinary streets.

But the young Borges was still searching for his voice.

He wrote essays, manifestos, poems. He experimented constantly. At times he cultivated a dense, almost baroque style that the older Borges would later reject. One of the most fascinating dimensions of his autobiography is his description of slowly discovering simplicity.

That discovery transformed him.

The mature Borges discovered that true complexity does not require verbal complexity. He came to admire the clarity of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, and Joseph Conrad. Little by little he developed the transparent prose for which he became famous: a prose so lucid that readers sometimes fail to notice how strange it truly is.

Late in life, reflecting on literature, Borges wrote something deeply revealing:

“When I was young, I thought literature was a game of skillful and surprising variations. Now that I have found my own voice, I think correcting and recorrecting my originals neither improves nor worsens them.”

The sentence feels almost like a farewell to literary modernism itself. Borges, who had once belonged to the avant-garde, came to distrust the cult of novelty and endless revision. He mocked the vanity that led James Joyce to publish fragments under the title Work in Progress. What mattered now was no longer innovation for its own sake, but tone, clarity, and fidelity to one’s voice.

Then, in 1938, Borges suffered a bizarre accident after striking his head on a window casement. Infection followed. For days he hovered between life and death. He later described the episode with terror, not because he feared dying, but because he feared intellectual destruction. He worried he might survive mentally diminished.

The experience changed literature.

Until then, Borges had been known primarily as an essayist and poet. During his recovery, terrified that he might no longer be capable of serious intellectual work, he attempted something different. He wrote Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

In some sense, modern Borges was born there.

What followed in Ficciones and later in The Aleph permanently altered twentieth-century literature. Borges invented a form difficult to classify even today. His stories resembled essays; his essays resembled stories. He compressed metaphysics into detective fiction, philosophy into parables, infinity into ten pages.

No writer demonstrated more clearly that literature could be intellectually profound without becoming heavy.

Through Borges, literature became a labyrinth, an encyclopedia, commentary on imaginary books, speculation about time and identity, dream of total libraries, meditation on mirrors and doubles. Much of contemporary literature, and perhaps even part of our digital imagination, still lives inside territories Borges first explored.

Yet just as his fame expanded internationally, blindness closed around him.

There is something almost unbearably symbolic in the chronology of his life. In 1955, the year Borges became director of the Argentine National Library, he also lost nearly all his remaining sight. He often remarked on the irony that God had given him “at one time eight hundred thousand books and darkness.”

Out of that paradox emerged one of his greatest poems, Poema de los dones:

“No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God; who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

The poem is extraordinary because it refuses self-pity. Borges transforms tragedy into metaphysical irony. Fate itself becomes literary.

Blindness also transformed his style. Because he could no longer read or write easily, Borges became increasingly oral. He dictated. His prose grew even more economical. Friends and students often remarked that spoken Borges could be even more dazzling than written Borges.

At the same time, the world slowly recognized his genius. Universities invited him. Translations multiplied. He lectured at Harvard, Texas, Oxford, and elsewhere. Readers across Europe and the United States discovered a writer who somehow seemed both ancient and entirely contemporary.

And yet Borges himself remained skeptical of Borges.

One of the most moving aspects of the autobiography is his recurring suspicion that fame may have been a misunderstanding. He repeatedly suggests that perhaps he was overrated, that he merely rearranged a few recurring metaphors and obsessions.

But that modesty concealed something deeper.

Borges understood that literature is not originality in the naive sense. Writers endlessly recombine a few eternal themes: time, love, courage, dreams, mirrors, death. Greatness lies not in inventing entirely new subjects, but in finding new intonations for permanent human mysteries.

In old age, Borges became increasingly serene. The aggressive avant-garde youth disappeared. The elderly Borges often sounds almost classical. He speaks less about innovation than about happiness, friendship, ethics, and peace. He valued emotional restraint. He distrusted excess. He preferred suggestion to declaration.

And perhaps the most surprising discovery of his autobiography is that Borges, who spent his life writing about labyrinths, infinities, metaphysics, and imaginary books, arrived at old age with desires that were almost disarmingly simple.

At seventy-one, already blind and internationally famous, he wrote:

“Today, despite the years, I still think of many things I would like to do before I die.”

What follows is strikingly modest. He dreams of seeing the Mississippi River, of rereading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Study in Scarlet, of traveling to Ireland, returning to Texas and Scotland.

The old Borges ends up desiring what had formed him as a child.

And then comes an even deeper revelation:

“At my age one should be aware of one’s own limitations, and that awareness perhaps contributes to happiness.”

This is the anti-modern Borges. The Borges who no longer seeks to astonish. The Borges who seems to have abandoned literary vanity.

Late in the autobiography he writes:

“I suppose I have already written my best books. That gives me a certain satisfaction and tranquility. Yet I do not think I have written everything.”

The sentence contains both resignation and hope. Borges believes his summit may already lie behind him, but he does not believe the story is over.

Finally, near the end of the essay, Borges writes words that may be among the most human he ever published:

“I no longer consider happiness unattainable, as I once did. Now I know it can occur at any moment, but one should never seek it. As for failure and fame, they seem irrelevant and do not concern me. What I want now is peace, the pleasure of thought and friendship. And though it may sound too ambitious, the feeling of loving and being loved.”

Those lines illuminate his entire work differently.

For decades Borges wrote about mirrors, tigers, labyrinths, knife fighters, eternity, libraries, and dreams. Yet at the end of his life, without renouncing literature, he seemed to suspect that something even more important existed beyond it: friendship, peace, thought, and the rare miracle of loving and being loved.

Perhaps that is the final image his autobiography leaves us with: not Borges the celebrity, nor Borges the blind sage, nor Borges the metaphysician, but Borges the reader.

A man formed by books from childhood onward.
A man who transformed reading into destiny.
And who, in the end, became one more immortal inhabitant of the library he entered as a child.

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

“At the risk of committing an anachronism—an offense not foreseen by the penal code, yet condemned by probability and by custom—we shall transcribe a note from the South American Encyclopedia, to be published in Santiago de Chile in the year 2074. We have omitted a paragraph that might prove offensive and have antiquated the spelling, which does not always conform to the requirements of the modern reader. The text runs thus:

BORGES, JOSÉ FRANCISCO ISIDORO LUIS: self-taught author, born in the city of Buenos Aires, then the capital of Argentina, in 1899. The date of his death is unknown, since newspapers—a literary genre of the period—disappeared during the great conflicts now summarized by local historians. His father was a professor of psychology. He was the brother of Norah Borges (q.v.). His preferences were literature, philosophy, and ethics. Evidence of the first is what has come down to us of his work, which nonetheless betrays certain incurable limitations. For example, he never came fully to appreciate Hispanic letters, despite his habitual recourse to Quevedo. He endorsed the thesis of his friend Luis Rosales, who argued that the author of the inexplicable Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda could not have written the Quixote. That novel, moreover, was among the few that merited Borges’s indulgence; others were those of Voltaire, Stevenson, Conrad, and Eça de Queiroz. He delighted in the short story, a trait that recalls Poe’s dictum, There is no such thing as a long poem, confirmed by the poetic practice of certain Eastern nations. As for metaphysics, it will suffice to recall a certain Key of Baruch Spinoza, 1975. He lectured at the universities of Buenos Aires, Texas, and Harvard, without any official degree beyond a vague Genevan baccalaureate that criticism continues to investigate.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by Cuyo and Oxford. A tradition has it that in examinations he never asked a question and would invite students to choose and consider any aspect of the subject. He did not require dates, alleging that he himself did not know them. He abominated bibliography, which estranges the student from the sources.

He was pleased to belong to the bourgeoisie, as attested by his name. The plebe and the aristocracy, devoted alike to money, gambling, sports, nationalism, success, and publicity, seemed to him identical. Around 1960 he joined the Conservative Party, because (he said) ‘it is undoubtedly the only one incapable of arousing fanaticisms.’

The renown Borges enjoyed during his lifetime, attested by a mass of monographs and polemics, does not fail to astonish us now. We know that he himself was the first astonished and that he always feared he might be declared an impostor or a bungler, or a singular mixture of both. We shall inquire into the reasons for that renown, which now appears mysterious.

We must not forget, first of all, that Borges’s years coincided with a decline of the country. He was of military stock and felt the nostalgia of the epic destiny of his forebears. He held that courage is one of the few virtues of which men are capable, but his cult of it led him, as it did many others, to a heedless veneration of men of the underworld. Thus, the most widely read of his tales was The Man on the Pink Corner, whose narrator is a murderer. He composed milonga lyrics commemorating kindred homicides. His popular-style stanzas, echoing Ascasubi, exhume the memory of knife-fighters very reasonably forgotten.

He wrote a pious biography of a certain minor poet, whose sole feat was to discover the rhetorical possibilities of the tenement. The writers of farce had already assembled a world that was essentially Borges’s, but cultivated readers could not enjoy their spectacles with an easy conscience. It is unforgivable that they applauded one who authorized that taste. His secret and perhaps unconscious aim was to devise the mythology of a Buenos Aires that never existed. Thus, over the years, he contributed, without knowing it and without suspecting it, to that exaltation of barbarism which culminated in the cult of the gaucho, of Artigas, and of Rosas.

Let us turn to the obverse. Despite Lugones’s Strange Forces (1906), Argentine narrative prose did not, as a rule, transcend the brief, satire, and the chronicle of manners; Borges, under the tutelage of his northern readings, raised it to the fantastic. Groussac and Reyes taught him to simplify the vocabulary, then encumbered with curious uglinesses: acomplejado, agresividad, alienación, búsqueda, concientizar, conducción, coyuntural, generosidad, grupal, negociado, promocionarse, recepcionar, sentirse motivado, sentirse realizado, situacionismo, verticalidad, vivenciar… The academies, which might have discouraged the use of such monstrosities, did not dare to do so. Those who condescended to that jargon publicly exhaled the style of Borges.

Did Borges ever feel the inner discord of his fate? We suspect that he did. He disbelieved in free will and was fond of repeating this sentence of Carlyle: ‘Universal history is a text we are bound to read and to write incessantly, and in which we are also written.’

His Complete Works (Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 1974) may be consulted; they follow with sufficient rigor the chronological order.”

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

For a long time, cinema was not primarily an art of fragile individual projects. It was an industry. Classical Hollywood looked, in many ways, less like the romantic world we now associate with film and more like a factory system. The great studios produced films, distributed films, and, for a crucial period, controlled many of the theaters in which those films were shown. They had stars under contract, directors under contract, writers under contract, and a production logic designed to turn artistic uncertainty into organized output. Cinema, in its classic age, was not just inspiration. It was infrastructure.

That system had obvious restrictions. It was hierarchical, controlling, often suffocating. Actors did not fully own their careers. Directors, unless they belonged to the very small elite with real bargaining power, worked inside an industrial discipline. Studios could shape public image, assign roles, manage reputations, and treat performers less like free artists than like assets in a portfolio. But the system also had one great economic virtue: it internalized risk. Not every film had to be a masterpiece. Not every release had to become an event. A studio could survive because it controlled the whole chain and because it produced at scale. Good films, mediocre films, prestige films, genre films, star vehicles, modest programmers: all had a place in the machine. That breadth mattered economically: a large slate of films, combined with control over distribution and exhibition, allowed the studios to absorb failures, cross-subsidize successes, and keep a wider professional world alive than a purely project-by-project system could.

That machine also shaped the lives of actors and directors. The old studio system could be exploitative, but it offered something that later eras would struggle to reproduce: continuity. A performer could belong to an industry rather than merely hustle at its edges. A director could work repeatedly inside a durable structure. Stars could become very rich, of course, but even below the top level there was a recognizable professional ladder. One could have a career without being a phenomenon. One could work steadily without becoming a global brand.

Then that world began to break. Part of the reason was institutional and legal. The old vertically integrated system was dismantled when the studios were forced to separate production and distribution from theater ownership. Once that structure was broken, Hollywood lost the ability to manage the entire chain as a single industrial organism. Part of the reason was also technological and social. Television entered the home and transformed leisure. Going to the movies ceased to be the natural weekly ritual it had once been. Hollywood did not die, but it lost the environment in which its old factory model had made sense.

And yet the most interesting thing is that what came next was not immediate decline. Between the collapse of the old studio system and the current world of franchises and platforms, there emerged something like a golden middle. This was the age of the great adult film: sometimes American, often European, often international in spirit even when local in language. It was the age in which cinema still had enough public centrality to sustain films that were ambitious without being gigantic, personal without being obscure, and intelligent without apologizing for it.

This is the part of the story that is too often skipped. We move too quickly from the old studio era to contemporary Hollywood, as if the transition were direct. It was not. There was a long and extraordinary period in which cinema became, in some ways, richer precisely because it had ceased to be only the factory production but had not yet become fully absorbed into the logic of franchises, intellectual property management, and platform strategy. Once adults could stay home and be entertained in their living rooms, cinema had to offer them a reason to leave. It had to compete not by being larger in volume, but by being better in quality: more serious, more sophisticated, more emotionally and aesthetically ambitious.

Europe gave the highest expression of that world. Italian cinema gave us films like 8½, La Dolce Vita, La famiglia, and later Cinema Paradiso: works in which memory, family, desire, irony, and melancholy could carry the full emotional weight of a film. Germany and the broader European co-production world gave us Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, films that moved at the pace of longing and thought. Scandinavia gave us Scenes from a Marriage, perhaps one of the purest examples of cinema trusting that adults could bear intimacy, discomfort, and psychological truth. France was central to this entire civilizational form: not only through the New Wave, but through the broader idea that cinema could be public and serious at once, literary and sensual, formal and emotionally alive. Spain too belonged to that world; a film like Saura’s Mamá cumple cien años reminds us that this was not merely a French-Italian achievement but a wider European ecosystem of adult cinema.

And then, for a while, America had its version too. Not by copying Europe mechanically, but by discovering that public cinema could also be intimate, conversational, morally ambiguous, and directed at grown people. This is where Manhattan matters so much. It is one of the clearest American examples of that lost middle: elegant, talkative, emotionally messy, recognizably literary, unmistakably urban, and yet still fully public cinema. Around it one could place films like Annie Hall, The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, The Conversation, Nashville, Kramer vs. Kramer, perhaps even Terms of Endearment. They are not identical in style, but they belong to a broad common world: films about adult life, made for adults, taken seriously by the culture, yet not confined to tiny niches.

That was the golden middle. It was neither the old studio assembly line nor the present split between the gigantic and the marginal. It was a zone in which serious cinema could still occupy a meaningful place in public life. It assumed that viewers could sit through silence, ambiguity, regret, erotic tension, and long emotional conversation. It trusted memory. It trusted character. It trusted that a film could be about marriage, jealousy, time, or disappointment and still matter.

Economically, that middle was sustained by a richer ecology than the one we have now. Theaters still mattered. Critics mattered. Festivals mattered. Television and later home video gave films second and third lives. International sales mattered. A film did not have to win only on opening weekend. It could travel, linger, be rediscovered, build prestige slowly. That ecology made room for a different type of actor and a different type of director.

This also changed the profession itself. In the studio era, actors and directors had less autonomy but more structural stability. In the golden middle era, many of them gained artistic freedom while still working in a relatively dense ecosystem. A respected director did not need to become a franchise manager. A serious actor did not need to become a superhero or a global celebrity in order to have a visible and meaningful career. There was room for the major star, yes, but also for the gifted working actor, the cultivated director, the performer known to an educated public even without commanding blockbuster salaries. Not everyone was rich, but more careers felt viable.

Then the industry changed again.

The easy answer is technology. Television weakened theatrical centrality. Home video created new revenue streams. Cable expanded the afterlife of films. Digital production lowered some barriers. Streaming transformed distribution. Artificial intelligence may alter production further. But “technology” alone is too crude an explanation. Technology changes an industry through institutions, incentives, financing, and the organization of risk. What changes, in other words, is not just the toolset but the chain of value itself: which assets matter most, who captures the surplus, and what kinds of projects look financially safer to back.

The deeper story is that the unit of control changed. In the old studio era, firms tried to control the physical chain: production, distribution, exhibition. In the contemporary era, large firms increasingly try to control rights, franchises, libraries, audience data, and direct access to consumers. The old moguls controlled theaters. The new conglomerates try to control intellectual property and attention.

That shift helps explain why the middle weakened. In a world of globalized distribution and fragmented attention, the safest products are either giant recognizable events or very small inexpensive productions. The giant film justifies a massive campaign and can travel internationally. The tiny film can survive by costing little and finding a niche. What becomes harder to sustain is the intelligent, mid-scale adult film that once occupied the cultural center. Economist Arthur De Vany argued that film revenues increasingly followed winner-take-all dynamics, with a tiny number of films capturing a disproportionate share of industry profits. In such an environment, the disappearance of the middle was not merely aesthetic. It was economically predictable.

These changes did not only alter financing, distribution, and career stability. They also altered the kinds of films that could naturally occupy the center of culture. Every industrial order in cinema carries, implicitly, an aesthetic order with it. It makes some artistic ambitions easier to sustain, some harder to finance, some more visible to the public, and some more likely to survive only at the margins. The shrinking of the middle was therefore not only an economic event. It was also an artistic one.

That is why today’s film world feels so polarized. At the top are giant franchise films, sequels, cinematic universes, branded entertainment designed to move across countries and languages. At the bottom are independent films, often serious and admirable, but frequently marginal in reach. What has thinned out is the space where many of the best films once lived.

And when that middle shrinks, the lives of actors and directors become more precarious too.

This is one of the least understood changes in the business. From the outside, the screen world looks more glamorous than ever. Faces are everywhere. Actors are visible on social media. Content is constant. The public recognizes more people than before. But visibility is not income, and fame is not security. One can appear in films, be recognizable, have prestige, and still earn far less than outsiders imagine. The profession has become more project-based, more discontinuous, more winner-take-all. There is a tiny elite at the top that still earns enormous sums. Beneath it lies a much less stable world. The new system increases visibility much more than it increases security: more people can be seen, recognized, and circulated, but the economic rewards remain far more concentrated than that wider visibility might suggest.

The public sees glamour. Insiders often experience intermittence. The modern screen economy has expanded apparent visibility while making real economic stability more elusive for a large share of those who work in it. The old system restricted freedom but provided structure. The golden middle gave more freedom while preserving a broader public market for serious work. The present system offers more exposure, more platforms, more volume, but often less continuity.

Streaming intensified this paradox. At first it seemed like liberation: more platforms, more buyers, more shows, more roles. But abundance of content is not the same thing as abundance of durable income. In the older system, films and series could generate a long afterlife through reruns, syndication, and home video. In the streaming era, the economics became more opaque and, for many performers and creators, less generous than appearances suggested. A work could be globally available and yet strangely disposable. It could be watched by millions and still leave behind less security than one might expect.

So the history of cinema can be told, in part, as the history of what happened to risk.

In the studio era, risk was internalized by large integrated firms. In the golden middle period, risk was cushioned by a rich cultural and commercial ecology. In the contemporary era, risk has been pushed outward and downward. The large firms still exist, but their strategy is different. What they want to own is not merely production capacity. It is intellectual property, franchises, libraries, data, and direct customer relationships. The problem is no longer just how to make films. It is how to command attention in a world saturated with alternatives.

And attention is now the scarcest resource of all.

A film no longer competes only with other films. It competes with series, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, gaming, social media, and the entire archive of audiovisual culture available at home. This changes everything. It favors what is already known, already branded, already legible at a glance. It rewards repetition. It raises the value of pre-sold universes. It makes originality more fragile economically, especially in the middle range where so much of the best cinema once lived. Sherwin Rosen’s classic analysis of superstar markets helps illuminate the broader transformation. Once technologies allow the best-known products to reach global audiences at very low marginal cost, small differences in visibility and recognition can generate enormous differences in rewards.

That is why the change cannot be explained simply as cultural decline, though part of it does feel like loss. Nor can it be explained as pure technological progress, though technology matters enormously. It is better understood as a transformation in industrial organization. The old cinema of the great studios was built on vertical integration. The great middle age of adult cinema was built on a denser public sphere for serious film. The current system is built on the management of intellectual property under conditions of fragmented attention.

None of this means that great movies no longer exist. They do, in every period, including our own, because talent does not disappear. But great films are harder to find now, less securely sustained by the industry around them, and their success feels more contingent, more accidental, than it once did.

References:

De Vany, Arthur. 2004. Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. London and New York: Routledge.

Rosen, Sherwin. 1981. “The Economics of Superstars.” American Economic Review 71(5): 845–858.

***If this essay resonated with you, you can subscribe to my Substack for regular reflections on economics, politics, geopolitics, AI, and literature.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-5.2. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.

Milan Kundera framed this paradox in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I first read it at eighteen. Back then the paradox of lightness haunted me. Only later did I see that consciousness itself overturns it.

Prologue

Now, forty years later, I return to it with a question. Was the answer that Kundera offered in that book to this existential dilemma the right one? Or does our human consciousness change the terms of the paradox?

The Thesis of Unbearable Lightness

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera offers one of the most provocative metaphysical propositions of the twentieth century: that life is unbearably light because it happens only once. There is no eternal return. No cosmic rehearsal. Each event, each decision, each love — all dissolve into insignificance precisely because they cannot be repeated.

This idea is first introduced through Tomáš, the novel’s main male character. A Czech surgeon torn between erotic freedom and emotional entanglement, Tomáš embraces lightness. He avoids commitments, refuses fatherhood, and clings to the freedom of the moment. To him, a child would be a “trap,” a form of irreversibility incompatible with his way of being.

But Kundera doesn’t leave it there. The narrator —who is not Tomáš, but a reflective, philosophical voice that hovers above the story— confirms the thesis. He invokes Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence —the notion that everything happens again and again, eternally— and contrasts it with our one-time-only lives. Because nothing repeats, nothing seems to matter.

This is the unbearable lightness of being.

The narrator tells us, quite plainly, that life is “light,” and that this lightness, rather than liberating, becomes a source of anguish.

Kundera, through both character and narrator, draws a dichotomy:
Weight is meaning, but it’s also burden. Lightness is freedom, but it’s also emptiness.

And since life offers no repetition —no second take, no counterfactual— its events lose weight. Its meanings evaporate.

This is a powerful vision. But as I will argue, it rests on a false dichotomy —one that collapses the moment we recognize the role of human consciousness.

The False Dichotomy

Kundera builds the vision of the lightness of being on a beautifully crafted dichotomy. He does not contradict himself. On the contrary: once he establishes the premise —that life happens only once, and therefore lacks weight— he follows its logic with poetic and philosophical rigor.

And yet, Kundera’s logic rests on a flawed assumption. The premise is false.

Life does not have to be light simply because it doesn’t repeat. Repetition is not the only path to weight. We humans possess something far more powerful: consciousness. The awareness of time, of memory, of meaning. It is our consciousness that gives weight to our experiences —even, and especially, the ones that happen only once.

A kiss, a betrayal, a death, a birth. These moments don’t need to return eternally to shape who we are. We remember them. We narrate them. We suffer them long after they end. Consciousness is our internal mechanism of eternal return —not literal, but emotional and symbolic.

And sometimes, that return is not light at all. On the contrary, it is unbearably heavy. A parent relives the loss of a child every day. A regret returns like a shadow. A love haunts us long after it’s gone. The repetition is internal, not cosmic —and that is enough.

This is why I believe the dichotomy Kundera constructs ultimately collapses: not because it lacks beauty, but because it denies the one force that makes meaning possible in human life. The lightness of being is only unbearable when we refuse to see how consciousness transforms experience into meaning —into weight itself.

And yet, I also know that Kundera knew this. Why else would Tomáš refuse to retract the public article that altered the course of his life? Because his conscience would not allow it. Why did Kundera choose to vanish from public life? Because he cared so deeply about his work that he wanted people to talk about the novels, not the man. That, too, was conscience. He chose what to give weight to —and what to treat lightly.

His work reflects this truth: that we live always between lightness and weight, never in the purity of either. A clear short summary of this is in his early story Nobody Will Laugh, from Laughable Loves. There, in a short story, the tension clearly emerges between what can be dismissed and what must be borne.

Some Theory

Kundera himself explained what he thought the novel was for. The art of the novel, he wrote, is to discover those aspects of human existence that cannot be discovered by other means.

This is not science. Consider the scientific study of behavior: it builds causal relations, but always at the level of populations. Science may tell us that secure property rights encourage investment. But science will never tell us why Anna Karenina committed suicide. That is the task of the novel.

For Kundera, the novel was a laboratory —a place to experiment with human existence, with human experience. He was not the first to see it this way, nor the last. But in his book The Art of the Novel, he articulated it as a program: the novel is a unique cognitive instrument, a way of knowing that no other discipline can replace.

And who are the subjects of his laboratory? The “experimental egos” that he created. Tomáš is one such ego. He is not Kundera himself, nor mere masks. He is an experiment in possibility. So it is the narrator. For that reason, we cannot conclude that Kundera himself believed in the unbearable lightness of being. Tomáš believed it —but never entirely. The narrator believed it —but with irony. But Kundera, the novelist, never quite believed. He experimented.

He said it best in his correspondence with Philip Roth: “The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question.” There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Parting Thoughts

Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being remains one of the most memorable paradoxes of modern literature. But seen through the lens of consciousness, the dichotomy he explores collapses: life is not unbearably light simply because it happens only once. Consciousness gives weight to our experiences.

Kundera offered no doctrine, only experiments. And the real question isn’t whether life is light or heavy, but what we choose to give weight to. In a culture obsessed with “living in the present,” the burden of memory and the pull of the future remain inescapable. Our children, after all, embody both. To live wisely is not to flee weight, but to balance it—between present and future, freedom and conscience.

*** Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT-4.0. as an editorial and language-refinement tool. The ideas and arguments are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them.