Ishiguro at the Limit: The Corporation and the Novel CHRIS HOLMES The early twenty-first century has seen a radical shift in how the aesthetic form of the novel addresses the abstraction of labor and the precarity of minority com- munities that have come to epitomize neoliberal capital. Novels increasingly attempt to formulate institutions apart from the privatizing drive that seeks to corporatize all civil society. This ambition to differentiate the novel from the primary ideology of this period has been marked by the emergence of a particular mode of critical rejoinder to the pervasive corporatist mind-set, a mode that I call limit thinking, in which novels draw attention to themselves as texts with which to produce new forms of thinking rather than as storehouses of information or political treatises. Novels operating in this mode are characterized by engagement with two types of limits, the first being representations of characters at the boundary of their ability to conceptualize their place in the machinery of the world. The second is a narrative limit: a linguistic, stylistic, or temporal limitation that emerges in response to the first type of epistemological limit as a formal expression. Each limit fixes the reader in a deliberative moment prior to a political or ethical decision. A dynamic emerges from the interaction of these two limit points that makes visible the processes by which competing forms, discourses, and languages can be held in relation to one another, reordered, and refigured; that is, witnessed in the act of thinking. A focus on limits would at first seem a shock to the system of novel theory, at least since M. M. Bakhtin proposed the novel as the omnivore genre that eats everything in its way. But Bakhtin, somewhat less famously, asserted that “[w]hen the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline” (15). And epistemology has always been limit driven, orienting the why and how of ideas around the axis of competing forms of discursive knowledge. It is both anecdotally and philosophically the case that thinking happens when we encounter barriers to understanding. Contemporary novels have increasingly sought to put their limits on display. From J. M. Coetzee’s literal border lines between essay, diary, and story genres in Diary of a Bad Year , to Tom McCarthy’s repetition ad nauseam of repre- sentation’s failures in Remainder , to what Mark Seltzer calls Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels of “nonknowing, and its institutionalizations,” the novel’s interventions into the present are less and less about sharing information and more about displaying a nontotalizing form of thinking as a counter to the monolithic discourses of neo- liberalism and corporatism (116). My understanding of the relationship between the limit and modes of thinking draws upon the Spinozian concept of the idea as thinking-in-process. Spinoza’s I would like to thank John Marx and Nancy Armstrong for their editorial direction and encourage- ment and Corey McEleney, Andrew van der Vlies, and Jennifer Spitzer for their generosity in reading too many drafts of this article. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 52:3 DOI 10.1215/00295132-7738560 Ó 2019 by Chris Holmes Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/52/3/386/692831/386holmes.pdf by ITHACA COLLEGE, cholmes@ithaca.edu on 04 November 2019