A Woman Thinking in Dark Times?: The Absent Presence of Hannah Arendt in J. M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello and the Problem of Evil"‪.‬

Summary This paper approaches Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003), in particular the section entitled "Elizabeth Costello and the Problem of Evil" (originally published in Salmagundi 2003), as a complex narrative in which intellectual and philosophical ideas merge with storytelling to create an intertextual matrix. By means of a close reading of the aforementioned "lesson", I aim to judge its contextualisation within a realm of intellectual and philosophical debates and thereby to reveal the influence of Hannah Arendt, who, I contend, emerges as one of the less obvious intertexts in a "novel" that is clearly celebrating intertextuality as a self-reflexive, intellectual game. By examining the text as an intertext, I suggest, as one possibility, that Coetzee is presenting Elizabeth Costello as a latter-day Hannah Arendt, a woman "thinking in dark times". If that is perhaps too decisive a reading for a slippery writer like Coetzee, then at the very least, he seems to be in conversation with Arendt on such issues as evil, banality and thinking.