The Interview

The Interview — Christopher Silvester / Umberto Eco

Introduction

The chapter "The Interview" in the NCERT Class 12 English textbook consists of two parts:

1.Part I — An extract from Christopher Silvester's introduction to · The Penguin Book of Interviews · (1993), which provides a literary-historical account of the interview as a journalistic form.
2.Part II — An interview with the famous Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, conducted by journalist Mukund Padmanabhan and originally published in · The Hindu · . The interview focuses on Eco's famous novel · The Name of the Rose · and his ideas about writing, academics, and "empty spaces."

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Part I — Christopher Silvester on the History of the Interview

Origin: The journalistic interview is a relatively modern form. Silvester traces it to the 1850s–1860s in America, when newspapers began quoting real people directly. The first recognisable interview in journalism is often attributed to around 1859.

Mixed Reception: Silvester documents how the interview was viewed with suspicion and hostility by many of its early subjects:
Rudyard Kipling called the interview a "crime" and a "desecration."
The Duchess of Argyll refused to be interviewed, calling the practice "an assault on the privacy of men of letters."
Joseph Conrad said being interviewed was "a form of humiliation" — the interviewer extracted private thoughts and presented them publicly.
Lewis Carroll refused to be interviewed entirely.

In Defence of the Interview: Silvester argues that despite this hostility, the interview has become one of journalism's most powerful tools. It allows readers to hear from public figures in their own words. The great journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called interviewing "one of the highest of the journalistic arts." Today, the interview is the dominant form through which public figures engage with the public.

The interview's power lies in making the interviewee reveal themselves — often more than they intend. A skilled interviewer, Silvester suggests, creates conditions in which truth emerges almost despite the subject's caution.

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Part II — Umberto Eco: The Interview

About Umberto Eco (1932–2016):
Italian novelist, literary theorist, semiotician, and academic.
Author of · The Name of the Rose · (1980) — a philosophical murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, which became an international bestseller.
He was first and foremost an academic and his novel was written, he claimed, to settle a score with some medieval monks he was thinking about.

Key Ideas Eco Expresses:

1. Anti-libraries and Unread Books
Eco says that a large private library of books you have NOT yet read is more valuable than one of books you have already read. He calls such unread collections "anti-libraries." An anti-library represents what you do not yet know — and knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom. (This idea was later popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in · The Black Swan · .)

2. The Interstices — "Empty Spaces"
Eco explains that he produces scholarly works AND popular novels not because he has two separate careers but because he uses the "empty spaces" of his day. While waiting for something, between tasks, in transit — he fills those moments productively. Most people, he says, waste these interstices; he treats them as writing time.

3. Comic Books and Academic Work
Eco is asked whether he feels academics who write fiction are taken less seriously. His response is relaxed — he suggests that in Italy, academics are expected to engage broadly with culture; the artificial separation between serious academic work and popular writing is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon prejudice, he implies.

4. On "The Name of the Rose"
Eco explains that he chose a medieval setting because it created maximum distance — both in time and cultural context — which allowed him to say things about the present without being read as direct commentary. The medieval monastery was also perfect because it was a world of total information control (monks, manuscripts, the library as power).

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Key Themes

1. The Ethics of the Interview
Part I raises the question: does the interview violate privacy, or does it democratise information? The great authors' hostility and the modern world's acceptance of interviewing as a norm create a productive tension.

2. The Nature of Creativity
Eco's account of using interstices challenges the Romantic myth of the creative genius waiting for inspiration. Creativity, he suggests, is about discipline and use of available time.

3. The Relationship Between Academic and Popular Writing
Eco's career proves that scholarly rigour and popular accessibility are not opposites. The same mind that produced dense semiotic theory also produced an internationally beloved novel.

4. Knowledge and Ignorance
Eco's anti-library concept reframes ignorance as potential rather than lack — what you do not know is an invitation to learn, not a deficiency.

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Common mistakes

The chapter has TWO parts by two different authors — do not attribute Silvester's ideas to Eco or vice versa.
Rudyard Kipling called the interview a "crime" — not a "sin" or "offence"; the exact word matters.
Eco's anti-library idea is about UNREAD books — students sometimes describe it as "books you have read."
"The Name of the Rose" is a medieval mystery novel, not a romance — despite the title, it is a philosophical detective story.
Eco was Italian, not French or Spanish — a common error.
The interview with Eco was conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan for · The Hindu · — not for a foreign publication.

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Summary

The chapter's two parts together interrogate the interview form from both sides: Christopher Silvester traces how journalism's interview evolved amid hostility from writers like Kipling and Conrad; Umberto Eco then demonstrates, through a brilliantly conducted interview, how a skilled subject can use the form to communicate complex ideas accessibly. Eco's reflections on anti-libraries, interstices, and academic creativity offer some of the most memorable intellectual content in the NCERT Class 12 English syllabus.