Recognition or Reification?: Capitalist Crisis and Subjectivity in Little Dorrit

This essay examines the representational obstacles posed for narrative recognition in the realist novel by crises in capitalism, focusing on Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857). Recognition scenes (Aristotle’s anagnorisis) in Victorian novels tend to model a form of subjectivity and temporality, of concealment and recovery, while capitalist crisis is radically unknowable through this same narrative epistemology. This incompatibility of recognition with the logic of capitalist representation (reification) is brought out through a comparative close reading of two recognition scenes in the multi-plot Little Dorrit.