Ecocriticism Depicted in the Novel 'Books Burn Badly' (Essay Sample)

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Books Burn Badly: Ecocriticism
In his novel, Rivas analyzes the consequences of sovereignty and the risks of subtending political legality with a type of supremacy capable of declaring exemption to the rule of law. In an interesting and venerable attempt, he appears to steer literature into the murky events that historians have de-emphasized and endeavours to address the issues of ecological injustice due to human dominion over environment. Through poetry, he revives the Francoist dictatorship's collective memory that led to the burning of thousands of books in the A Coruña's libraries. He revisits the historical reception of Carl Schmitt in Madrid and Galicia and the impact of Schmitt's sovereignty concept in Spain. The novel links the exercise of Schmittian sovereignty to a multitude of persistent political and social issues besetting Spain in the 21st-century, including ecological calamity, police misconduct and brutality, augmented immigration to Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan's conflicts, and the North American War on Terror.
In the novel, Books Burn Badly, Rivas's literary thematization of sovereign power reiterates Agamben's contention. Agamben argues that sovereign power has always been concerned with the 'production of a bio-political body' (Agamben 5). Therefore, Rivas seems to intimate a connection between the limit case in which one discovers a long-lasting exemption, like in Francoist's dictatorship, and how life is subjectivized and politicized in indulgent contemporary democracies. His concern spreads into ecological debates, particularly human dominion over nature, which is viewed as flawed because of the danger it poses in the current world. The plot of Books Burn Badly contains virtually six decades, from the inception of the Civil War to the end of the 20th-century. It arches forward from two main plot themes (the Civil War and bio-perversity), whose corresponding central characters intertwine and coincide over the narrative's course.