THE LIBRARY OF THE THIRD MILLENIUM
Authors: Stišović Milovanović Ana 
Published: September 2021

Literature and literary theory at the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third millennium were challenging many issues. The dichotomy of modern and postmodern poetics has led to certain wanderings. Postmodern literature dealt with the question of the relation between the author and the text, but on the logic of inner opposites. The relationship of reality and text has been transformed into the construction of the world, and the text is often only a modified architect. The construction of a story becomes more important than the story itself. The author's intentions lead to radical discontinuity with earlier known ways and narrative models. The postmodern code minimizes the possibility of the distinction between structural elements of the work. Wittgenstein therefore spoke about the impossibility of improving theoretical thoughts on literature. It is interesting that Umberto Eco was trying to reintegrate the characteristics that determined value systems in the entire literary history and gave safe grounds for theoretical considerations of the literary text. Eco starts from the idea that the code is the basic unit of meaning, which carries the system of rules, "whether it is essential, generally valid, conclusive or historical, transient or superficial." Calvino also thinks in this discourse. Italo Calvino is a postmodern writer, but in his work there is a peculiarity, which makes it a true code keeper. This is first seen in the construction of a work as a system, which can be independent of reality, but does not deviate from solid, almost geometric forms, symmetry, combinatorics, proportions. In the essays of Italo Calvino, the author of "innovative imagination", there is a corpus of texts about authors who are interested in the problem of language, themes and forms in literature. Calvino writes about Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Queneau, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges. This selection of writers is paradigmatic, since Calvino recognizes them as the authors of the encyclopedic type. The encyclopaedic openness of the work is, for Calvino, in fact a multitude of codes and levels, which are translated from one time to another, from one poetics to the next. Selected authors are the guards of the heritage of literary history and the entire discourse of written words, but are also the foothold for all future authors. Calvino believes that these writers are the foundation of the "library of the third millenium" because they combine imaginatively and intellectually. For Italo Calvino, "in the infinite universe of literature, the paths of research are always open, whether old or new," because literature is a "search for self-consciousness". In this search, the most important issues of language, theme and form. In the language code, Calvino returns simplicity to myths and fairy tales, in order to avoid linguistic arbitrariness and loss of language expressiveness. Borges also insisting on the importance of language and myth as the fundamental phenomenon of total literary creation. In preserving the code, Calvino believes that literature must fight the authenticity, the recognition of individual and collective heritage, by multiplying internal consent. These are the ways in which anonymous and abstract pictures of the world can be overcome, offered by literature from the postmodern wanderings. Calvino says it is necessary to preserve, in the "library of the third millennium", a rich legacy of imaginative knowledge, in which literature will be the activity of an intellectual order. This library is proof of the necessity of continuity in literature, which ensures the quality of literary work, but also theoretical thoughts about it.