The Interview — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: The Interview (Class 12 English)

A two-part chapter. Part I, from Christopher Silvester's introduction to The Penguin Book of Interviews, sets the case against the interview beside the case for it. Part II is Mukund Padmanabhan's interview with Umberto Eco, in which Eco explains his 'interstices', his narrative scholarship, and the mystery of The Name of the Rose.

Christopher Silvester

Born 1959, a student of history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a reporter for Private Eye for ten years, and a writer of features for Vanity Fair. The extract is from his introduction to 'The Penguin Book of Interviews, An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day'.

The interview's age

'Since its invention a little over 130 years ago, the interview has become a commonplace of journalism.' Opinions of its functions, methods and merits 'vary considerably'.

The high claim

Some make 'quite extravagant claims for it as being, in its highest form, a source of truth, and, in its practice, an art'.

The objection

Celebrities who see themselves as its victims 'might despise the interview as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives' — compared to the belief in some primitive cultures that a photographic portrait steals a person's soul.

V. S. Naipaul

He 'feels that some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves'.

Lewis Carroll

The creator of Alice in Wonderland was said to have had 'a just horror of the interviewer' and never consented to be interviewed — it was 'his horror of being lionized' that made him repel interviewers and autograph-hunters.

Rudyard Kipling

The harshest view: 'Why do I refuse to be interviewed? Because it is immoral! It is a crime, just as much of a crime as an offence against my person, as an assault.' His wife Caroline's diary for 14 October 1892 records a day 'wrecked by two reporters from Boston'.

Kipling's inconsistency

'Yet Kipling had himself perpetrated such an assault on Mark Twain only a few years before.' H. G. Wells called it 'the interviewing ordeal' yet was a frequent interviewee and later interviewed Stalin.

Saul Bellow

He consented to be interviewed several times, yet 'once described interviews as being like thumbprints on his windpipe'.

The case for the interview

Denis Brian: 'our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are through interviews… Almost everything of moment reaches us through one man asking questions of another. Because of this, the interviewer holds a position of unprecedented power and influence.'

Umberto Eco

A professor at the University of Bologna with a formidable reputation in semiotics, literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics before he turned to fiction. In 1980 'The Name of the Rose' brought him intellectual superstardom, selling more than 10 million copies.

Interstices

Eco's secret: eliminate the empty spaces in all the atoms and 'the universe will become as big as my fist'. Our lives have such empty spaces too — 'I call them interstices'. Waiting for a lift to come from the first floor to the third, 'I have already written an article!'

Telling the story of the research

A professor told him his dissertation 'told the story of your research. Even including your trials and errors' — and then published it. At 22 he understood scholarly books should be written that way, which is why his essays 'always have a narrative aspect' and why he began novels only at about 50.

Novelist or scholar

'I consider myself a university professor who writes novels on Sundays. It's not a joke.' He attends academic conferences rather than meetings of Pen Clubs, and identifies with the academic community — but knows novels reach a larger audience.

Why The Name of the Rose succeeded

Journalists and publishers 'believe that people like trash and don't like difficult reading experiences'. His American publisher expected 3,000 copies 'in a country where nobody has seen a cathedral or studies Latin'; it sold two or three million there. His own verdict: 'I think the success of the book is a mystery. Nobody can predict it.'