The Interview — Class 12 English

This lesson is in two parts, drawn from Christopher Silvester's introduction to 'The Penguin Book of Interviews'. Part I discusses the interview as a literary and journalistic form. Since its invention about 130 years ago, the interview has become a commonplace of journalism, yet opinions on it vary greatly. Some regard it, in its highest form, as a source of truth and even an art; others — usually celebrities who see themselves as its victims — despise it as an intrusion that diminishes them, like the primitive belief that a photograph steals one's soul. The author cites writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Saul Bellow, who variously condemned or disliked being interviewed (Bellow called interviews 'thumbprints on his windpipe'), while also noting that the interview is a supremely serviceable medium through which we form our most vivid impressions of contemporaries, giving the interviewer great power. Part II is an extract from Mukund Padmanabhan's interview of Umberto Eco, the Italian professor and scholar of semiotics who became world-famous with his novel 'The Name of the Rose'. Eco explains that despite his vast and varied output, he is always pursuing the same philosophical interests; he uses the 'empty spaces' or interstices of time to work, writes scholarly books in a narrative style, and considers himself a university professor who writes novels on Sundays. He regards the huge success of his serious, difficult novel as a mystery that cannot be predicted.