Summary of the Lesson

Part I — the interview as a form

The first part, drawn from Christopher Silvester's introduction to the Penguin Book of Interviews, reflects on the nature and worth of the interview. Silvester observes that although the interview is only about a hundred and thirty years old, it has become an utterly common feature of journalism, and that almost everyone who is literate has, at some point, read an interview and formed views about it.

Opinions about the form, he notes, differ sharply. Many well-known people have disliked being interviewed. Some have felt it to be an intrusion into their private selves, and a few have spoken of it in strong terms — as though an interview somehow lessened them or robbed them of a part of their being. Silvester recalls that certain distinguished writers and public figures resented or mistrusted the practice: V.S. Naipaul felt that people are "wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves"; Lewis Carroll is said to have had "a just horror of the interviewer" and never consented to be interviewed; Rudyard Kipling condemned the interview as "immoral," "a crime" and "an assault"; H.G. Wells called it an "ordeal"; and Saul Bellow, who submitted to interviews, compared them to "thumbprints on his windpipe." Against this, Silvester sets a very different judgement: others have valued the interview highly, and he cites the view that it is "a supremely serviceable medium of communication" — a way of letting people speak and be truly known. The interview, in short, is both feared and prized.

Part II — the conversation with Umberto Eco

The second part presents Mukund Padmanabhan's interview with Umberto Eco. Padmanabhan begins by remarking on the astonishing range and volume of Eco's output and asks how he manages to accomplish so much. Eco explains, with characteristic wit, that he exploits the interstices — the small, empty spaces that open up in the course of any ordinary day. While others let such gaps go to waste, he fills them with thought and work; while a visitor's elevator rises from the first to the third floor, he says, he has "already written an article."

Eco then reflects on his identity. Although the world knows him best as the novelist of The Name of the Rose, he insists that he is first and foremost an academic and a scholar who happens, on the side, to write fiction — "a university professor who writes novels on Sundays." He also describes his distinctive style of scholarly writing: rather than presenting research in a dry, impersonal manner, he narrates the very process of his enquiry — the trials and errors — so that his non-fiction reads with something of the pleasure of a story. …