Class 12 English Flamingo Chapter 7 Question Answer | The Interview

Class 12 English Flamingo Chapter 7 Question Answer | The Interview | ASSEB

Class 12 English Flamingo Chapter 7: The Interview – Christopher Silvester

Welcome to HSLC Guru’s complete study guide for ASSEB (Assam State Board of Secondary Education) Class 12 / HS 2nd Year English Flamingo Chapter 7 — “The Interview” by Christopher Silvester. This lesson is unique in the Flamingo textbook because it is presented in two parts. Part I is a theoretical and historical extract from Christopher Silvester’s Penguin Book of Interviews, An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day. It traces the 130-year history of the interview as a journalistic form, summarises the divergent opinions celebrity writers (V. S. Naipaul, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Saul Bellow, etc.) have held about it, and finally argues that, in spite of these objections, the interview is a “supremely serviceable medium of communication” and a “vital tool” of modern journalism. Part II is an actual interview — taken by Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu with the celebrated Italian semiotician, philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco — in which Eco discusses his “secret” of doing many things (“interstices”), his playful narrative academic style, and the unexpected runaway success of his novel The Name of the Rose. This guide covers detailed summaries of both parts, the Assamese সাৰাংশ, every NCERT textbook question with answer, and a large bank of additional short, long, MCQ and extract-based questions for the ASSEB HS Final Exam.

About the Author and the Interviewee

Christopher Silvester (born 1959) is a British journalist, writer and former staff reporter at Private Eye. He is best known as the editor of The Penguin Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day (1993), from whose Introduction this prose extract (Part I) is taken. In that book Silvester surveys the entire history of the interview as a journalistic genre, weighs the views of those who admire it against those who detest it, and concludes that the interview has become an indispensable form of modern communication.

Umberto Eco (1932–2016), the subject of Part II, was an internationally famous Italian scholar at the University of Bologna who made path-breaking contributions to semiotics (the study of signs), literary criticism, philosophy and medieval aesthetics. Late in life he turned to fiction and astonished the world in 1980 with his first novel, The Name of the Rose — a medieval murder mystery that combined detective fiction with theology, semiotics and library lore, and sold over ten million copies worldwide. He went on to write Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, scholarly works such as A Theory of Semiotics and several children’s books on peace and non-violence.

Mukund Padmanabhan, the interviewer in Part II, is a senior journalist with The Hindu (he later became its Editor). His questions are crisp, well-prepared and respectful, and they draw out from Eco an honest, animated and humorous self-portrait.

Summary – Part I (Christopher Silvester on the Interview)

Christopher Silvester opens by reminding us that the interview, in its various forms, has been a recognised feature of journalism for more than 130 years — ever since it first appeared in the late nineteenth century. In that comparatively short time, it has become a “commonplace of journalism”: today, almost every literate person has at some point read an interview, and many thousands of celebrities have been interviewed over the years. Some have even been interviewed several times across their careers. The interview, Silvester says, is therefore an extremely functional and important medium of communication between famous people and the public.

Yet, opinions about the interview have always been sharply divided. Some thinkers regard it almost as an art form — a fine and revealing mode of writing through which the deepest insights into a celebrity’s character can be captured. Others consider it a sinister intrusion into a person’s private life; some even believe it diminishes the dignity of the person being interviewed and, in extreme metaphorical language, “wounds” or “leaves a scar” on the subject’s soul.

Silvester then quotes a long list of celebrated writers who detested being interviewed.

V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian-British Nobel laureate, claimed that “some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves” — every interview, in his view, takes a small piece of the subject away.
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was said to have “a just horror of the interviewer”. He repelled all approaches from interviewers and autograph hunters with such aversion that even his nephew described his refusal as a near-pathological fear of being lionised.
Rudyard Kipling went further. In his diatribe he called the interview “immoral”, “a crime”, “an assault” and “a cowardly and vile” act. He even said that no respectable man would ever ask for one or grant one — comparing it to felony for which the offender deserved to be punished.
H. G. Wells, in 1894, called the interview “an ordeal”, though, ironically, he later interviewed Joseph Stalin himself in 1934.
Saul Bellow, the American Nobel laureate, who was repeatedly interviewed in his lifetime, once described interviews painfully as “thumbprints on his windpipe” — suggesting that an interview pressed on him like fingers choking his throat.

Silvester also notes that in many primitive cultures people believed that being photographed caused the photographed person to lose his or her soul, because some part of the personality was thought to be carried away in the picture. Many writers carry over a similar superstition into their attitude towards interviews — as though each interview robbed them of a piece of themselves.

However, Silvester firmly insists that — whatever its drawbacks — the interview, in its highest form, is a “source of truth” and a “supremely serviceable medium of communication”. The interviewer occupies a position of “unprecedented power and influence” in our time. For most people, the interviewer is the chief source of information about the personalities of contemporaries — politicians, sportsmen, film-stars, writers, artists. Through the interview we get the most “vivid impressions” of our times. The interview is therefore a vital, almost indispensable tool of modern journalism, and it is here to stay.

Summary – Part II (Mukund Padmanabhan’s Interview with Umberto Eco)

Part II is the actual interview taken by Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu with Umberto Eco at the time when Eco was already world-famous as a semiotician, novelist and academic. Padmanabhan begins by remarking that Eco is known internationally for his ideas on semiotics, his serious academic works on literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics, his five novels, his children’s books and his numerous essays — and asks how on earth he finds the time to do all this. Where, asks the interviewer, does he get the time?

Eco answers with a smile that this is a “secret” he is willing to reveal. There are, he says, “empty spaces” — what he calls “interstices” — between every two events of the day. If a visitor is coming, and the lift takes ten seconds to reach Eco’s floor, those ten seconds belong to Eco; if a visitor is delayed by twenty minutes, those twenty minutes belong to Eco. In these tiny, otherwise wasted intervals he writes an article. He explains it in a wonderful image: if the universe were full of “fillers” instead of empty spaces, it would be infinitely large; in the same way, if a human being were to remove all the empty interstices, his work would shrink “to the size of a fist”. Working in the interstices, Eco accomplishes far more than is normally possible.

Padmanabhan then points out that Eco’s scholarly writing has a distinctive playful and personal quality, very different from the dry, dehumanised style of most academic writing. Eco agrees and says it took him a long time to develop. As a young researcher he had been fortunate, he says: when he was twenty-two and writing his doctoral dissertation on the aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas, his supervisor advised him to tell the story of his research — including its trials and errors — instead of presenting only the polished conclusions as if the writer were a god. Eco found that this narrative aspect, this telling of the story of how knowledge was produced, made his academic books readable and almost like fiction. Even his most scholarly works, he says, contain a “narrative aspect”, which is why his academic writing has the personal, playful, accessible quality that readers love.

When Padmanabhan asks whether Eco considers himself a novelist who became an academic or an academic who became a novelist, Eco answers with characteristic humility: he identifies primarily as a university professor who happens to write novels on Sundays. He says he is the same person, doing the same things — pursuing the same philosophical interests, particularly questions of peace and non-violence — whether he writes a scholarly book, a novel, a children’s book, or an essay. Books, novels and children’s writings, he insists, are simply different ways of expressing the same set of ethical and philosophical concerns. He attends academic conferences as a professor, not as a novelist; this is how he sees his identity. He is amused that the world reverses these proportions — to the public he is a “novelist who happens to teach”, but in his own eyes he is a “scholar who happens to write novels”.

Finally Padmanabhan brings up The Name of the Rose, which sold more than ten million copies worldwide. Why, he asks, did this difficult novel — full of medieval history, theology, semiotics and metaphysics — become such a runaway success? Eco modestly says he himself does not know, and that if he had known the formula, others would have copied it long ago. He suggests that journalists like to think that readers want trash and easy reads; but he believes that readers in fact like to be challenged — that there is a hunger for serious, demanding books. He also points out the curious fact of timing: had the novel been written ten years earlier or ten years later, it might never have caught on. He admits he is one of those rare authors who has had this kind of success, and he counts himself fortunate. He even observes wryly that some interviewers feel disappointed when they discover that he is “primarily” a scholar and that the novel for which he is famous worldwide is, in his own self-image, a Sunday hobby.

সাৰাংশ (Assamese Summary)

“The Interview” পাঠটো দুটা ভাগত বিভক্ত। প্ৰথম ভাগটো ক্ৰিষ্টোফাৰ ছিলভেষ্টাৰে লিখা — য’ত তেওঁ সাক্ষাৎকাৰ (Interview) নামৰ সাংবাদিক ৰূপটোৰ ১৩০ বছৰৰো অধিক ইতিহাসৰ চমু আলোচনা কৰিছে। তেওঁৰ মতে, সাক্ষাৎকাৰ এতিয়া আধুনিক সাংবাদিকতাৰ এক অপৰিহাৰ্য, “সৰ্বোত্তমভাৱে কামত অহা যোগাযোগ মাধ্যম” হৈ পৰিছে। তথাপি ইয়াৰ বিষয়ে দুটা সম্পূৰ্ণ বিপৰীত মতামত আছে। কিছুমানে ইয়াক এক কলা-ৰূপ বুলি গণ্য কৰে, যাৰ যোগেদি বিখ্যাত ব্যক্তিৰ চৰিত্ৰৰ গভীৰ সত্য উন্মোচন হয়; আনহাতে কিছুমান বিখ্যাত লেখক যেনে ভি. এছ. নাইপল, লুইছ কেৰল, ৰুডিয়াৰ্ড কিপলিং, এইচ. জি. ৱেলছ, চল বেলো — সাক্ষাৎকাৰক ব্যক্তিগত জীৱনত হস্তক্ষেপ আৰু “আত্মাক ক্ষতি কৰা” কাম বুলি ভাৱে। নাইপলে কৈছিল যে সাক্ষাৎকাৰে মানুহক “আঘাত” কৰে; কিপলিঙে ইয়াক “অপৰাধ”, “অনৈতিক” আৰু “কাপুৰুষোচিত” বুলি কঠোৰ ভাষাত নিন্দা কৰিছিল; চল বেলোৱে ইয়াক নিজৰ “শ্বাসনলীত আঙুলিৰ ছাপ” বুলি বৰ্ণনা কৰিছিল। প্ৰাচীন উপজাতীয় সমাজত মানুহে ভাবিছিল যে ফটো তোলালে আত্মাৰ এটা অংশ চুৰ হৈ যায় — অনেক লেখকেও সাক্ষাৎকাৰৰ বিষয়েও সেই একে ভয় কৰে। তথাপি ছিলভেষ্টাৰৰ মতে, সাক্ষাৎকাৰ “সত্যৰ উৎস” আৰু সমসাময়িক ব্যক্তিৰ সম্পৰ্কে “সবাতোকৈ জীৱন্ত ছবি” দিয়া গুৰুত্বপূৰ্ণ মাধ্যম।

দ্বিতীয় ভাগটো হৈছে The Hindu কাকতৰ মুকুন্দ পদ্মনাভনে বিখ্যাত ইটালীয় চিন্তাবিদ আৰু ঔপন্যাসিক উম্বেৰ্টো একোৰ পৰা লোৱা প্ৰকৃত সাক্ষাৎকাৰ। একোৱে এজন আগশাৰীৰ সিমিওটিচিয়ান (চিহ্ন-শাস্ত্ৰৰ পণ্ডিত), মধ্যযুগীয় নন্দনতত্ত্ব, সাহিত্য সমালোচনা আৰু দৰ্শনৰ গভীৰ পণ্ডিত; লগতে পাঁচখন উপন্যাস (য’ত প্ৰসিদ্ধ The Name of the Rose অন্তৰ্ভুক্ত), অলেখ ৰচনা আৰু কেইবাখনো শিশু-গ্ৰন্থৰ লেখক। পদ্মনাভনে সুধিছে — ইমান কাম একে সময়তে কেনেকৈ কৰে? একোৱে ক’লে যে তেওঁৰ “ৰহস্য” হৈছে “ইণ্টাৰষ্টিচ” — অৰ্থাৎ দুটা কামৰ মাজৰ “খালী সময়”, যিবোৰ আমি আমনি নকৰি এৰিদিওঁ। এই সৰু সৰু সময়খিনিতেই তেওঁ লেখা-মেলা কৰে। তেওঁৰ একাডেমিক লেখাৰ এক আখ্যান-ধৰ্মী (narrative) চৰিত্ৰ আছে — গৱেষণাৰ ভুল-ত্ৰুটি আৰু পথটো গল্পৰ ৰূপত কৈ যোৱা পদ্ধতিটো তেওঁ গৱেষক হিচাপে শিকিছিল, যিয়ে তেওঁৰ একাডেমিক লেখাবোৰক ব্যক্তিগত আৰু সঁচা অৰ্থত পঢ়িবলৈ সুখজনক কৰি তোলে। নিজকে তেওঁ প্ৰথমে এজন বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ৰ অধ্যাপক বুলিহে গণ্য কৰে, যিজনে দেওবাৰে উপন্যাস লিখে। সকলো লেখাৰ পিছত — উপন্যাস হওক, একাডেমিক প্ৰবন্ধ হওক বা শিশু-গ্ৰন্থ — তেওঁৰ মূল আগ্ৰহ একেই: শান্তি, অহিংসা, নৈতিকতা আৰু দৰ্শনৰ প্ৰশ্ন। The Name of the Rose-ৰ অপ্ৰত্যাশিত সফলতা সম্পৰ্কে একোৱে ক’লে যে যদি তেওঁ ইয়াৰ ৰহস্য জানিলেহেঁতেন, তেন্তে আৰু কেইবাজনো লেখকে সেইটো অনুকৰণ কৰিলেহেঁতেন। তেওঁৰ ধাৰণা — পাঠকে কঠিন আৰু গভীৰ লেখাৰ প্ৰতিও আগ্ৰহী, আৰু এই উপন্যাসখন প্ৰকাশৰ সঠিক সময়ই তাৰ সফলতাৰ প্ৰধান কাৰণ।

Understanding the Text (NCERT Textbook Questions)

Part I

Q1. What are some of the positive views on interviews?

Answer: According to Christopher Silvester, the interview, in its highest form, is regarded as a source of truth and even practised as an art. Many critics and journalists consider it a “supremely serviceable medium of communication”. For most readers, the interviewer is the chief source of information about contemporary celebrities, and through interviews we get our most “vivid impressions” of public figures. The interviewer therefore occupies a position of unprecedented power and influence in modern times, and the interview has become a vital tool of journalism.

Q2. Why do most celebrity writers despise being interviewed?

Answer: Most celebrity writers despise being interviewed because they regard the interview as an unwarranted intrusion into their private lives that diminishes them and, in some sense, “wounds” or scars them. V. S. Naipaul felt that “some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves”; Lewis Carroll had a “just horror” of interviewers and refused them entirely; Rudyard Kipling called interviews “immoral” and “a crime”; H. G. Wells called them “an ordeal”; and Saul Bellow described them as “thumbprints on his windpipe”. They see the interview as a violation that strips them of dignity, privacy and, metaphorically, a piece of the soul.

Q3. What is the belief in some primitive cultures about being photographed?

Answer: In some primitive cultures, it is believed that if a person is photographed, then he or she will lose a part of his or her soul. The image takes away something essential from the person. Silvester uses this belief as a parallel to explain why many writers feel similarly diminished by interviews — as though every interview steals a fragment of their inner self.

Q4. What do you understand by the expression “thumbprints on his windpipe”?

Answer: The expression was used by the American novelist Saul Bellow to describe what an interview felt like to him. The phrase suggests strangling — as if invisible thumbs were pressing on his throat, choking him. By this striking metaphor Bellow conveys that being interviewed is a painful, suffocating, almost violent experience in which a forceful interviewer wrings personal details out of him against his will.

Q5. Who, in today’s world, is our chief source of information about personalities?

Answer: In today’s world, the interviewer is our chief source of information about contemporary personalities. Through the questions an interviewer asks and the answers a celebrity gives, the readers and viewers form their most vivid impressions of public figures — politicians, writers, sportspersons, artists and film-stars. The interviewer therefore enjoys a position of unprecedented power and influence.

Part II

Q1. Do you think Umberto Eco likes being interviewed? Give reasons for your opinion.

Answer: Yes, it appears that Umberto Eco enjoys being interviewed. He answers Mukund Padmanabhan’s questions with great enthusiasm, animation and good humour. He laughs while explaining his “interstices” and is more than willing to share the secrets of his work, his writing process and his self-image as a scholar. He does not show any reluctance, no irritation, no sign of regarding the interview as an intrusion. On the contrary, his frank, witty, sometimes self-deprecating answers suggest that he treats the interview as a friendly intellectual conversation. Hence, unlike Naipaul or Kipling, Eco genuinely seems to enjoy being interviewed.

Q2. How does Eco find the time to write so much?

Answer: Eco finds the time to write so much by making creative use of what he calls “interstices” — the empty spaces or small gaps between two events of the day. Most people throw these moments away, but Eco uses them. If a visitor is delayed by twenty minutes, or if a lift takes ten seconds to reach his floor, he uses those minutes and seconds to write. He explains, in a beautiful image, that the universe is full of empty spaces between atoms; if those interstices were filled, the universe would shrink dramatically. By writing inside these tiny intervals he is able to produce articles, novels, scholarly works and children’s books while still being a full-time university professor.

Q3. What was distinctive about Eco’s academic writing style?

Answer: What was distinctive about Eco’s academic writing style was its narrative, playful and personal quality. Most academic writing is dry, impersonal and dehumanised — the scholar pretends to be a god dispensing finished truths. Eco, by contrast, learnt as a young researcher (under his doctoral supervisor’s advice) to tell the story of his research, including its false starts, trials and errors. As a result, his scholarly writing has a “narrative aspect” — it reads almost like a story — and it carries a personal, conversational voice. This combination of academic rigour with narrative warmth is the hallmark of Eco’s style.

Q4. Did Umberto Eco consider himself a novelist first or an academic scholar?

Answer: Umberto Eco firmly considered himself an academic scholar first and a novelist only second. He told Padmanabhan that he was, in his own self-image, “a university professor who writes novels on Sundays”. He attends academic conferences as a professor, not as a novelist. He insisted that all his writings — scholarly books, novels, children’s stories, essays — flow from the same set of philosophical concerns and that fiction is, for him, a Sunday occupation, not a primary identity.

Q5. What is the reason for the huge success of the novel, The Name of the Rose?

Answer: Eco himself confesses that he does not fully know why The Name of the Rose sold over ten million copies — had he known the formula, he says, others would have copied it. However, he gives two probable reasons. First, the novel deals with a serious blend of medieval history, theology, semiotics, metaphysics and detective fiction; he believes that journalists are wrong when they assume readers want only easy reading — readers, in fact, “like to be challenged” by a difficult, demanding book. Second, he stresses the importance of timing: had the same novel been written ten years earlier or ten years later, it might never have caught on. The right book at the right historical moment, he says, was the real secret of its success.

Talking about the Text

Q1. Talk about any interview you have read or seen on television, or heard on the radio. Carry out a discussion in class about what you think makes a good interview.

Answer: A good interview, as the example of Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview with Umberto Eco shows, has the following features:

The interviewer is thoroughly prepared: he or she knows the interviewee’s background, achievements and views.
The questions are crisp, focussed and intelligent, and they invite the subject to reveal something genuine.
The interviewer is respectful but not flattering; he or she does not try to twist or trap the subject.
The conversation has a natural flow, allowing the subject to speak freely while keeping the focus on important issues.
The interviewer remains in the background and does not steal the spotlight from the interviewee.
The result is honest, informative and lively — the reader feels he or she has met a real human being and not merely a public mask.

Q2. The medium you think is most effective for an interview — print, radio or television? Why?

Answer: Each medium has unique advantages. Print permits depth, careful editing and re-reading, and is best for serious intellectual exchange (as in the Eco interview). Radio conveys voice, tone, hesitation and laughter — it captures the subject’s personality through sound. Television, however, is the most powerful, because it combines voice with body language, facial expression and eye contact, giving the audience the most “vivid impression” of the person. For an analytical, scholarly interview, print is best; for emotional impact and reach, television wins.

Q3. Find out names of some of the leading interviewers and tell the class what makes them stand out as interviewers.

Answer: Famous interviewers include Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, David Frost, Barbara Walters, Karan Thapar, Prannoy Roy and Rajdeep Sardesai. They stand out for their research, courage to ask the difficult question, sensitivity, empathy and the ability to bring out the human side of guests, whether the guests are politicians, scientists, sportsmen or ordinary citizens.

Working with Words

Q1. Match the following with their meanings.

Word / Phrase	Meaning
Lionised	Treated as a celebrity, given great public admiration
A diatribe	A bitter and abusive verbal attack
Ordeal	A painful or trying experience
Despised	Hated, regarded with contempt
Intrusion	An act of forcing one’s way into another’s private space
Unwarranted	Not justified; uncalled for
Serviceable	Useful, capable of giving good service
Unprecedented	Never done or known before
Interstices	Small empty spaces between two things
Diatribe	A forceful and bitter verbal attack against someone or something

Q2. Use the following phrases in sentences of your own.

To strike a chord — His speech on patriotism struck a chord with the entire audience.
To draw a line — The interviewer must draw a line at questions that invade personal grief.
An ordeal — Facing the board exam without preparation can be quite an ordeal.
To despise something — Lewis Carroll despised being lionised by autograph hunters.
An intrusion — Photographing the family at a funeral is a needless intrusion.

Additional Short Answer Questions

Q1. How long has the interview been a feature of journalism?

Answer: The interview has been a recognised feature of journalism for more than 130 years, that is, since the second half of the nineteenth century. In that comparatively short span of time it has become a “commonplace of journalism” all over the world.

Q2. Why did Lewis Carroll have a “just horror of the interviewer”?

Answer: Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, dreaded interviewers because he was extremely sensitive about being lionised — being made into a celebrity and pursued by autograph hunters. He felt that interviewers diminished a man’s privacy. He repelled all approaches from interviewers and autograph hunters with such determination that his own nephew described his refusal as a near-pathological fear of public attention.

Q3. What did Rudyard Kipling say about the interview?

Answer: Kipling delivered a famous diatribe against the interview. He called it “immoral”, “a crime”, “an assault”, and “a cowardly and vile” act, declaring that no respectable man would ever ask for one or grant one. He went so far as to say that interviewers should be punished as criminals are punished.

Q4. What was the irony in H. G. Wells’s attitude towards interviews?

Answer: The irony was that, although Wells in 1894 condemned the interview as “an ordeal”, he himself, just forty years later, in 1934, became one of the most famous interviewers in history when he interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow. The man who hated being interviewed himself became an interviewer.

Q5. What did Saul Bellow mean by calling interviews “thumbprints on his windpipe”?

Answer: By the metaphor “thumbprints on his windpipe”, Saul Bellow meant that interviews choked and suffocated him. He felt as if invisible fingers were pressing on his throat — extracting personal details from him forcibly. The metaphor captures the painful, intrusive and almost violent quality the interview had for him.

Q6. What is Silvester’s final verdict on the interview?

Answer: Silvester’s final verdict is positive. Despite all the objections of celebrity writers, he insists that the interview, in its highest form, is a “source of truth” and a “supremely serviceable medium of communication”. He concludes that the interviewer occupies a position of “unprecedented power and influence” and that we owe to interviewers our most “vivid impressions” of contemporary public figures.

Q7. What does Eco mean by “interstices”?

Answer: By “interstices” Eco means the small empty spaces or gaps between two events of one’s daily routine — for example, the ten seconds while waiting for a lift, or twenty minutes while waiting for a delayed visitor. Most people throw these moments away. Eco, however, fills them with productive writing and that, he says, is the secret of how he is able to do so much work.

Q8. How did Eco’s doctoral experience shape his writing style?

Answer: While writing his doctoral dissertation on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, his supervisor advised the young Eco to tell the story of his research — including the wrong turns and false hypotheses — instead of presenting only the polished conclusions. This advice taught Eco to write with a strong narrative voice, and that narrative voice has remained the distinctive feature of all his subsequent academic and literary work.

Q9. How does Eco describe his identity?

Answer: Eco describes himself essentially as “a university professor who writes novels on Sundays”. He attends academic conferences as a professor, not as a novelist. Whether he writes a scholarly book, a novel or a children’s book, he says, he is doing the same thing — pursuing his philosophical concerns about peace, non-violence and ethics.

Q10. What kind of novels do journalists assume readers want, according to Eco, and how does he disagree?

Answer: Eco says journalists assume readers want only easy and trashy novels (“trash and easy reads”). He disagrees and argues that readers, on the contrary, “like to be challenged” by demanding, intellectually serious books. He cites the success of The Name of the Rose as proof that millions of people are willing to read difficult fiction.

Q11. What does Eco mean when he calls timing the secret of The Name of the Rose‘s success?

Answer: By “timing” Eco means that a literary work succeeds only if it appears at the precise moment when the public is ready for it. Had The Name of the Rose been published ten years earlier or ten years later, he says, the same novel might have failed completely. The book caught a wave of historical and cultural readiness that no formula could have engineered.

Q12. What is Eco’s central philosophical concern across all his books?

Answer: Across all his books — academic, fictional, and even his children’s writings — Eco pursues the same core philosophical concerns: peace, non-violence, ethics and the question of how human beings make and interpret meaning. Whether expressed through scholarly semiotics, a medieval murder mystery or a story for children, his goal is the same.

Q13. What does Mukund Padmanabhan’s interviewing technique tell us about him?

Answer: Padmanabhan emerges as a model interviewer. He is well-prepared (he knows Eco’s books, his semiotics and his fiction), his questions are crisp and intelligent, his manner is respectful but not flattering, and he keeps himself in the background, allowing Eco to shine. He skilfully draws out Eco’s ideas without ever seeming intrusive.

Q14. Why is the interview called a “vital tool of journalism”?

Answer: The interview is a vital tool of journalism because it is the principal way in which the public gets direct, first-hand information about important contemporary personalities. It is fast, vivid, accessible and, when well done, it provides not only facts but also a sense of the personality behind those facts. No other journalistic form combines these qualities so well.

Q15. What is the parallel Silvester draws between primitive cultures and modern celebrities?

Answer: Silvester points out that, just as people in primitive cultures believed that being photographed stole away part of one’s soul, many modern celebrity writers feel that being interviewed steals away part of their inner self. The metaphor of the lost soul links primitive superstition with the modern writer’s distrust of the camera and the journalist.

Long Answer Questions

Q1. Discuss the various views on the interview as expressed in Christopher Silvester’s essay (Part I).

Answer: Christopher Silvester presents two opposing schools of thought on the interview. On the one hand, he says, the interview, in its highest form, is a “source of truth” and “an art” — a serviceable medium that gives the public its most vivid impressions of contemporary celebrities and that has therefore become an essential, irreplaceable instrument of modern journalism. On the other hand, many famous writers have detested it: V. S. Naipaul felt it “wounds” the subject; Lewis Carroll fled from interviewers in horror; Rudyard Kipling called it “immoral”, “a crime” and “an assault” in a famous diatribe; H. G. Wells called it “an ordeal” (and ironically went on to interview Stalin); Saul Bellow described it as “thumbprints on his windpipe”. They saw the interview as an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes its subject — a metaphor parallel to the primitive belief that a photograph steals one’s soul. Silvester acknowledges these complaints but concludes that the interview’s services to journalism and to the public far outweigh its abuses, and that it occupies a position of “unprecedented power and influence” today.

Q2. Describe Umberto Eco’s “secret of doing many things” and explain how it reveals his attitude to time and work.

Answer: The “secret” by which Umberto Eco manages to be a full-time professor, a novelist, a children’s writer and a prolific essayist is what he calls the use of “interstices” — the empty spaces between two events of the day. While most of us throw away the ten seconds before a lift arrives or the twenty minutes a guest is late, Eco fills these tiny intervals with writing. He explains it with a brilliant cosmic image: the universe itself is filled with empty spaces between atoms; if one removed those interstices, the universe would shrink “to the size of a fist”. His attitude to time is therefore one of extreme respect: every fragment of the day, however small, is precious and can be transformed into productive work. This explains both his enormous output and his cheerfulness about it: nothing — not waiting, not interruption — is ever truly wasted. The lesson for students is profound: large achievements are built not in long uninterrupted hours but in faithful use of the small spaces of life.

Q3. Sketch the character of Umberto Eco as it emerges from Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview.

Answer: From the interview Eco emerges as a deeply lovable combination of intellectual giant and humble human being. He is, by global reputation, one of the foremost living thinkers — a path-breaking semiotician, a novelist whose Name of the Rose sold ten million copies, the author of important scholarly works on medieval aesthetics. Yet he describes himself simply as “a university professor who writes novels on Sundays”. He answers each question with frankness, humour and warmth — he laughs, he confesses he does not know all his answers, he is willing to share his methods. His intellectual humility is striking: he refuses to take credit for the success of The Name of the Rose, attributing it instead to the readers’ love of difficult books and to lucky timing. He is disciplined yet playful, scholarly yet narrative, modern yet rooted in medieval studies. His ethical concern with peace and non-violence unites all his work. Eco, in short, is the rare scholar who treats his enormous fame as a side-effect of pursuing a few simple ideas with patience and joy.

Q4. “Mukund Padmanabhan was a model interviewer.” Discuss with reference to the text.

Answer: Mukund Padmanabhan demonstrates every virtue of a fine interviewer. First, he is thoroughly prepared: his questions show that he has read Eco’s academic works and his novels and that he is familiar with semiotics. Second, his questions are crisp and intellectually substantial — they ask not for trivia but for Eco’s working method, his self-image, the secret of his success. Third, he is respectful but not obsequious: he never flatters Eco and never tries to trap him. Fourth, he keeps himself in the background, letting Eco hold the spotlight while gently guiding the conversation. Fifth, he creates an atmosphere in which Eco feels free to laugh, to confess that he does not always know the answer, and to reveal his “secrets”. The result is the classic kind of interview Silvester praised in Part I — informative, vivid, honest, and a window into a great mind. Padmanabhan is therefore a textbook example of how the interview, well done, becomes a “source of truth”.

Q5. Were the celebrity writers’ objections to interviews fully justified? Argue your case.

Answer: The objections of writers like Naipaul, Carroll, Kipling, Wells and Bellow are partially justified. Genuine grievances do exist: aggressive interviewers can intrude on private grief, twist words, sensationalise statements and reduce serious thinkers to entertainment material. Carroll’s horror of being lionised was real; Kipling’s anger at unauthorised, sensational interviews of his time was understandable. But the objections are also too sweeping. They condemn the form of the interview itself instead of the abuse of the form. The interview with Eco demonstrates the opposite case: a careful, prepared, respectful interview honours its subject, gives the public access to a great mind and creates no harm at all. As Silvester says, in its best form the interview is “a source of truth” and “supremely serviceable”. The fairest verdict is therefore: the writers were right to attack bad interviewers, but wrong to attack the interview as such.

Q6. What does Eco’s success suggest about the modern reader?

Answer: The astonishing sale of more than ten million copies of The Name of the Rose — a novel saturated with medieval theology, semiotic puzzles, library lore and metaphysical reflection — overturns the lazy assumption (held by many publishers and journalists, says Eco) that modern readers want only easy, trashy entertainment. Eco’s success suggests that there is a vast audience that “likes to be challenged” and that hungers for serious ideas wrapped in good story-telling. It suggests that intellectual seriousness is not the enemy of popular success: the right serious book, at the right cultural moment, can find an enormous public. Eco’s success is a vote of confidence in the modern reader’s intelligence.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

1. Who is the author of “The Interview” Part I?
(a) Umberto Eco (b) Christopher Silvester (c) Mukund Padmanabhan (d) V. S. Naipaul

2. The interview has been a feature of journalism for about how many years?
(a) 50 (b) 80 (c) 130 (d) 200

3. According to Silvester, the interviewer holds a position of:
(a) entertainment (b) corruption (c) unprecedented power and influence (d) servitude

4. V. S. Naipaul felt that interviews:
(a) bring fame (b) wound and rob people of a part of themselves (c) bring wealth (d) earn respect

5. Lewis Carroll wrote which famous book?
(a) The Name of the Rose (b) Alice in Wonderland (c) Foucault’s Pendulum (d) Animal Farm

6. Lewis Carroll dreaded being:
(a) interviewed (b) photographed (c) lionised (d) all of these — actually all three apply, but the text specifically uses “lionised”

7. Rudyard Kipling described the interview as:
(a) a fair art (b) “immoral, a crime, an assault, cowardly and vile” (c) joyful (d) inspiring

8. Whom did H. G. Wells himself interview in 1934?
(a) Hitler (b) Roosevelt (c) Stalin (d) Churchill

9. Who described an interview as “thumbprints on his windpipe”?
(a) Kipling (b) Wells (c) Saul Bellow (d) Naipaul

10. In some primitive cultures, being photographed was thought to:
(a) bring good luck (b) cause illness (c) steal a part of one’s soul (d) attract spirits

11. Silvester finally calls the interview a:
(a) curse (b) “supremely serviceable medium of communication” (c) waste of time (d) form of slavery

12. Mukund Padmanabhan worked for which newspaper?
(a) Times of India (b) Indian Express (c) The Hindu (d) The Telegraph

13. Eco’s “secret of doing many things” is the use of:
(a) caffeine (b) overtime (c) interstices (empty spaces between events) (d) assistants

14. Eco’s most famous novel is:
(a) Foucault’s Pendulum (b) The Name of the Rose (c) Baudolino (d) The Island of the Day Before

15. The Name of the Rose sold approximately how many copies?
(a) one million (b) five million (c) ten million (d) twenty million

16. Eco describes himself primarily as:
(a) a film director (b) a university professor who writes novels on Sundays (c) a politician (d) a journalist

17. Eco’s doctoral dissertation was on the aesthetics of:
(a) Aristotle (b) Plato (c) Dante (d) St Thomas Aquinas

18. The distinctive feature of Eco’s academic style is:
(a) heavy footnoting (b) brevity (c) narrative, playful, personal quality (d) extreme abstraction

19. Eco believes the success of The Name of the Rose was due to:
(a) marketing (b) easy plot (c) readers’ love of being challenged + the right timing (d) film adaptation

20. The unifying philosophical concern across all of Eco’s writings is:
(a) profit (b) fame (c) peace and non-violence / ethics (d) tourism

21. Eco is internationally regarded as a path-breaking scholar of:
(a) physics (b) semiotics (c) genetics (d) astronomy

22. According to Eco, if the empty interstices were removed from a person’s day, his/her work would shrink to the size of a:
(a) coin (b) fist (c) house (d) cricket ball

23. According to Silvester, the interviewer is the chief source of:
(a) gossip (b) advertisement (c) information about contemporary personalities (d) profit

24. “An ordeal” was H. G. Wells’s description of:
(a) writing a novel (b) being interviewed (c) speaking in Parliament (d) travelling

25. Eco said that journalists assume readers want:
(a) poetry (b) news (c) “trash and easy reads” (d) photographs only

Extract-Based Questions

Extract 1: “Despite the drawbacks of the interview, it is a supremely serviceable medium of communication. ‘These days, more than at any other time, our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are through interviews,’ Denis Brian has written. ‘Almost everything of moment reaches us through one man asking questions of another.'”

(i) What is described as a “supremely serviceable medium of communication”?
Answer: The interview.

(ii) Whose words are quoted here?
Answer: Denis Brian’s words are quoted.

(iii) Why does the writer call the interview “supremely serviceable”?
Answer: Because, despite its drawbacks, it gives readers the most vivid impressions of contemporary public figures and is therefore the central tool through which “almost everything of moment” reaches us.

(iv) Find the meaning of “vivid”.
Answer: Bright, lively, and producing strong, clear images in the mind.

Extract 2: “V. S. Naipaul ‘feels that some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves,’ Lewis Carroll, we are told, had ‘a just horror of the interviewer’ …”

(i) What did Naipaul feel about interviews?
Answer: He felt that interviews wound some people and that interviewees lose a part of themselves.

(ii) What did Lewis Carroll have, according to the passage?
Answer: “A just horror of the interviewer.”

(iii) Why did Carroll feel this horror?
Answer: Because he dreaded being lionised — that is, being made a celebrity and pursued by interviewers and autograph hunters.

(iv) Give a synonym for “horror”.
Answer: Dread, terror, intense fear.

Extract 3: “There are empty spaces — what I call interstices … these interstices, this is my secret.”

(i) Who is the speaker?
Answer: Umberto Eco.

(ii) What does the speaker mean by “interstices”?
Answer: The small empty gaps between two events of the day, such as the ten seconds while a lift arrives or the twenty minutes when a visitor is delayed.

(iii) How does this “secret” help him?
Answer: By writing during these interstices he is able to produce articles, novels and scholarly books while still being a full-time university professor.

(iv) What value lies behind this idea?
Answer: Respect for time and the conviction that no moment, however small, need be wasted.

Extract 4: “I consider myself a university professor who writes novels on Sundays.”

(i) Who said this and to whom?
Answer: Umberto Eco said this to Mukund Padmanabhan.

(ii) What does it tell us about his self-image?
Answer: That he sees himself primarily as an academic scholar; novel-writing is, in his self-image, a Sunday hobby.

(iii) What is striking about this remark?
Answer: Its humility — even though his novels have sold over ten million copies worldwide, he refuses to call himself “primarily” a novelist.

Extract 5: “I think readers like to be challenged.”

(i) Who said this?
Answer: Umberto Eco.

(ii) In what context?
Answer: While discussing the unexpected success of The Name of the Rose, a difficult medieval-philosophical novel.

(iii) What assumption is he challenging?
Answer: The journalists’ assumption that readers prefer only “trash and easy reads”.

(iv) What lesson can young readers draw?
Answer: That serious, demanding books are not commercially impossible — that the public’s taste is higher than publishers often assume.

Themes of the Lesson

1. The Interview as an Art and a Power. Silvester’s central claim, demonstrated by the Eco interview that follows, is that the interview is no mere intrusion but a serious form of communication that, at its best, becomes a “source of truth” and an “art”. The interviewer wields “unprecedented power and influence” in shaping our impressions of contemporary life.

2. Privacy versus the Public Right to Know. The lesson dramatises the perpetual tension between the celebrity’s right to privacy (Naipaul, Carroll, Kipling, Bellow) and the public’s right to know about famous figures. The interview lives precisely in this tension and must always negotiate between the two.

3. Eco’s Philosophy of Time — the Use of Interstices. Eco’s idea of “interstices” — squeezing productive work into the small empty spaces of the day — is one of the great practical philosophies of work to come out of modern interview literature. It teaches readers that productivity is not a function of long blocks of free time but of the disciplined, joyful use of small ones.

4. Intellectual Humility. Despite his global fame, Eco describes himself as a teacher who writes “on Sundays”, confesses he does not know why his novel succeeded, and credits readers and timing rather than himself. This humility is held up implicitly as a model for serious thinkers.

5. Unity of Scholarly and Creative Work. Whether writing semiotics, novels, essays or children’s books, Eco insists he is doing “the same thing” — exploring peace, non-violence and the making of meaning. Genuine intellectual life, the chapter suggests, is unified by ethical concern, not divided by genre.

6. Faith in the Reader. Against the cynicism of publishers and journalists who believe the public wants only “trash”, Eco’s success defends a more generous vision: readers like to be challenged, and difficult, serious books can find a vast audience when they appear at the right moment.

This concludes the complete HSLC Guru study guide for ASSEB / CBSE Class 12 English Flamingo Chapter 7 — “The Interview” by Christopher Silvester (Part I) and the Mukund Padmanabhan interview with Umberto Eco (Part II). Master the summaries, the celebrity views in Part I, the concept of “interstices” in Part II, the Eco character sketch and the long answers above; the chapter is a frequent and high-scoring source of long-answer and extract-based questions in the HS Final Examination.