The introductory chapter traces the history of the dual alphabet from the eighth to the twenty-first centuries, focusing mainly on the English nineteenth century and outlining the argument that will be detailed in subsequent chapters. The possible links between typographic and political radicalism are explored in the work of Charles Dickens and in a range of nineteenth-century writers including William Wordsworth, George Crabbe, Thomas Carlyle, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the suffragist poet Augusta Webster, Karl Marx and Marx’s English translators.

This chapter compares a pivotal passage from the first edition of Das Kapital (1867), in which the double-spacing of letters is used to represent Marx’s manuscript underlining, with the 1887 English translation. The absence of any representation of Marx’s manuscript underlinings reduces the oratorical force and obscures the satirical intent of the original, but in a way that is partially compensated by the sort of expressive capitalisation, influenced by Carlyle and Dickens, that English conventions make possible. Just as some German philosophical words can prompt the retention of their German capitals in English (Hegel’s ‘Ideen’ and ‘Subjekt’ often becoming ‘Idea’ and ‘Subject’) ‘F r e i h e i t, G l e i c h h e i t, E i g e n t h u m und B e n t h a m’ prompts ‘Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ and ‘Geldbesitzer’ (money owner) prompts ‘Mr Moneybags’.

Dickens prepared a Reading of Great Expectations which was never used, possibly because it had to sacrifice the representation of Pip’s acquisition of literacy, including the chaotic combination of upper and lower case in Pip’s letter to Jo. That the expressive capitalisations in Our Mutual Friend are present in the manuscript rather than made on the proof suggests that Dickens was thinking of this as a novel specifically for literate readers, which compounds the isolation of an illiterate character like Gaffer Hexham. In Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, Marigold’s adopted daughter cannot speak or hear, and the story describes his attempts to teach her to read. Evidently written with a view to revision as a Reading, it foregrounds its own status as writing, while the prompt copy for Doctor Marigold foregrounds its own status as script for a Reading. However, since Dickens lived before the age of the phonograph and the film, problems remain for modern readers of the prompt copy: when Marigold teaches Sophy to read and lip-read his own name, it is represented as ‘D O C T O R M A R I G O L D’. Did Dickens speak these as words, as letters or as letter-names?

This concluding chapter proposes four neologisms for thinking about Cixous’s writings (and thus for gathering together the concerns of the book as a whole). 1) The nanoment (portmanteau of ‘nano-’ and ‘moment’) refers to something very brief, an abrupt, fleeting, interruptive, unforeseen moment that nonetheless has strange power of illumination or expansion. It offers opportunities to construe life, the world, ourselves and others anew. 2) ‘Narratoid’ (a portmanteau of ‘narration’ and ‘meteoroid’) refers to the ULO (‘unidentifiable literary object’), to the found (as if falling from the heavens) quality of certain words and phrases in Cixous, and to the way that these can explode and impact across a text. 3) ‘Omnicisence’ (a play on ‘omniscience’) refers to the sense that, in Derrida’s phrase, ‘there is no atom’. ‘Omnicisence’ is about Cixous’s ‘art of cutting’. It entails a way of thinking about literature (especially fictional narrative) that does not, however discreetly, rely on religious thinking (so-called narrative omniscience). 4) ‘Ornithophony’ (Cixous’s invention) alludes to all the ways in which thinking about human life, art and literature (especially voice and music) is bound up with birds. This is illustrated through a reading of Ulysses and Cixous’s The Exile of James Joyce.

This chapter takes the openings of four of Cixous’s books (Manhattan, Hyperdream, Love Itself in the Letter-Box and Eve Escapes) as the basis for a discussion of the unconventional, experimental, even violent nature of her writing. Particular emphasis is given to the question of time and the speed of life: as Derrida more than once remarked, ‘Life will have been so short’. In what ways is this future anterior (‘will have’) perhaps especially characteristic of the contemporary world? Cixous’s work helps us think about the extent to which, as Mark Currie puts it in About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, ‘the present is experienced in a mode of anticipation’. How might writing best engage what Currie calls ‘this anticipatory mode of being’? In quite different ways, both Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida highlight an uncanny sense of speed in Cixous’s work. The chapter develops their work in order to suggest how deeply Cixous’s writing resonates in a time of climate change, mass species extinction and escalating dependence on teletechnologies.

This brief chapter offers a reading of Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes. Like other chapters bearing the title ‘Cixous cuts’, this involves a discussion of the multiple senses of ‘cut’ in her work. Like every other book Cixous has published, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes is full of cuts of different kinds. Particular attention is given to the ways in which her ‘primal scenes’ are at once allied with Freud’s conception of this term and discreetly but significantly at odds with it. The chapter focuses above all on the traumatic, traumatised passage in Reveries of the Wild Woman in which Cixous recalls, as a seven-year-old in Algeria, witnessing the terrible fate of a veiled young Muslim girl on a Ferris wheel in 1944. This is announced as the ‘tale of a girl who gets cut in two’ and provides the final, most horrifying ‘primal scene’ in Cixous’s book.

How does one finish a book about Hélène Cixous, a writer who is endlessly concerned with open ends, with what she calls ‘the book I don’t write’, and with the conviction that, quite apart from the living, ‘no dead person has ever said their last word’? ‘All wards’ is a neologistic formulation suggested by Cixous as a way of thinking about both writing and life. Exploration of the phrase leads to a discussion of ‘lingophobia’ (‘fear of language’ as well as ‘fear of the tongue’) and the ‘unidentifiable literary object’ (ULO), a term that, it is suggested, describes as well as any other the kind of texts she writes. At stake here is a distinction between realism and what Cixous calls ‘realistizing’. This chapter focuses on the concept of character (the subject of her remarkable early essay ‘The Character of “Character”’) and also explores the figure of the ULO in the context of Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching and Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House, as well as Shakespeare.