Changing the Future: In Conversation with Kaliane Bradley and Anton Hur

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 119: Futurisms, our Associate Editor So Mayer interviews Kaliane Bradley and Anton Hur about their recently published debut novels. They discuss narration and translation, the climate crisis and the erotic, and much more.

You can read and download the full interview for free until the end of November on the Taylor & Francis website, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 119, our 40th Anniversary Issue, which is available to purchase.

Kaliane Bradley and Anton Hur are both forces in contemporary publishing: the former as an editor at Granta and now Penguin Random House, as well as an award-winning short-story writer, and the latter as an equally award-winning translator and editor. Both have championed transparency and inclusion in an industry that (see Wasafiri 117) remains overtly white, middle class, and policed. Both now bring their experience and passion for new narratives to their own first novels: The Ministry of Time and Toward Eternity, respectively. Both embrace – I use the word advisedly, as both books are deeply romantic – science fiction while challenging its imperial, militaristic, and technological preoccupations through characters who find themselves fighting state institutions and experiments. Both are also deeply committed to asking how we live in the everyday of late capitalist, climate crisis, neocolonial life — and so, it felt appropriately quotidianly science-fictional to be able to be in conversation via the ubiquitous Zoom, one early March morning in the office for Kaliane in London, and late evening for Anton at home in Seoul.

So Mayer This question to you both comes from the character Adela in The Ministry of Time: ‘Would you say that you found your work erotic?’ I’m interested in the text, and also in the process of writing.

Anton Hur I was just thinking of the sex scenes in The Ministry of Time, which are very, very sexy: this guy is really hot! This question, though, reminds me of erotic – and this is such a cop out – in the more abstract sense: when Susan Sontag says, ‘what we need is an erotics of art’, at the end of her essay, ‘Against Interpretation’. I remember reading that as a seventeen- year-old or something, a very impressionable age. I felt like I couldn’t become a professor, but I was always seeking a very Susan Sontag way of being in books and being literary, because she was also not an academic. She very consciously decided to be outside of that system and to live her life according to the principles that she outlined in ‘Against Interpretation’.

In writing my novel, I very consciously had to let go. I had to stop intellectualising and judging, stop trying to explain why I was writing something. Because, by then, I had encountered Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok [translated by Anton Hur for Sublunary Editions], a series of aphorisms taken from his poetic lectures. It’s a very erotic – in the sense of art as eroticism – book,where he says, ‘Stop thinking, writing is done by your hands, not your head. Let your hand just write, and you can think about it after you’ve written it.’ And then he says, ‘but the tragic thing is that writers always do the opposite. They think about it as they’re writing, and then they don’t think about it after they’ve written’.

My book was very much a product of reading Lee’s book. That’s also why I wrote it on the subway, because the subway disables your executive functions. You lend yourself to the flow, because you’re giving yourself up to the train, so that the train can take you to someplace, and you can’t control the way the train takes you. That rhythm and flow fit into the mindset that I had when I was writing the book. It created what for me was a very physical act. I always say translation is a very physical thing. I can retroactively explain why my subconscious made these choices, but when I’m translating, I try to get out of my own way as much as possible, and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting. So, I wrote this book the way that I translate — and I find that to be a very physical, eroticist way of working.

Kaliane Bradley Do you find that the way that you write changes depending on the place you’re putting yourself in, and the affective state of your environment?

AH I don’t know. I wrote it mostly on the subway, but I also wrote it in some other places, like by the pool in Thailand. In Lee’s book, he says that language is its own kind of thing, its own world, its own animal. Or it’s like a chain of animals, each biting the tail of the word that comes next. There’s a chain of animals that are biting each other, and you have to very gently pull on the tail of one animal so that the next animal comes out with it. So, for me, it’s always been less of an effect of what is around me, and more an effect of what is inside of me — that’s how I visualise it. For my work environment, I try to make it non-distracting, or to have something like white noise or this programme called Classical Focus on BBC Sounds. You can’t play that outside of the UK, so I’m the only person who’s got a VPN because he couldn’t listen to Classical Focus. It’s for coaxing my subconscious which is the true diva: I go through the writing lists that she – or he – provides, and I work with that.

SM Diva pronouns very much undecided … all, I think! Kaliane, is your inner diva affected by where you’re writing? Or are you more: noise cancelling headphones on, everything is the same?

KB Everything I’ve ever written has been written in a very, very, very small room. I have a problem with distraction in that my brain is always wanting to tell itself another story, already wanting to move on from a sentence before I’ve written it down because it’s got bored. I can’t even really listen to music because I find that that tends to affect the rhythm of the prose in a way that changes what I’m writing as it goes along. If I’m listening to two different genres, I’ll end up writing two different kinds of book, and it will mess up the book! The only way that I can write is if I lock everyone out, leave my phone somewhere else. I can’t research on the Internet while I’m writing. I have to focus for an hour at a time and tell myself I’ll give the book an hour. The tragic fact is I do it like a child doing homework. Except that rather than being an obligation, it’s an invitation to escape obligation. It’s funny that you asked about the work being erotic because I sometimes think of it as a kind of flirtation between me and a text that doesn’t yet exist. And the pursuit of it is like a flirtation or a seduction. And, as with flirtations and seductions, it’s not necessary to sustain life, but it does bring quite a lot of interest to it …

Photo by C D-X on Unsplash