Mens en Moeder natuur, een helse symbiose W.F. Hermans’ Ruisend gruis (1995) in ecofeministisch perspectief

In Erosie (1960), the geologist W.F. Hermans shows himself to be an early critic of the Anthropocene: in this public thesis, he argues that the ecological footprint of humanity will have a disastrous planetary impact. Yet as a novelist, Hermans is not well-known as a writer of ‘ecocritical’ literature. I propose, however, that an ‘environmental orientation’ can be observed in his work. His novel Ruisend gruis (1995), when analyzed in a ecofeminist framework, foregrounds that humans have a deeply ambiguous relationship to nature: nature is idealized as a loving ‘Mother Nature’ and simultaneously feared as an unfathomable, violent force. In psychoanalytic terms, this ambiguity can be understood as an unconscious tension between a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ and a ‘depressive’ position towards women – specifically mothers. An ecofeminist reading demonstrates how these positions are evoked in Ruisend gruis and that the novel, consequently, raises profound ethical questions about the relation between the human and the non-human.