The Interview

Christopher Silvester's introductory essay explores the mixed views of celebrities about interviews: Views in favour of interviews: • Some celebrities welcome interviews as an opportunity to share their perspectives, publicise their work, and connect with their audience. • Interviews can be a form of intellectual exchange and can help create a public record of a person's ideas and achievements. Views against interviews: • Many celebrities strongly dislike and even dread being interviewed. Their objections fall into several categories: 1. Invasion of privacy: The interview forces a person to expose their inner life to a stranger and the public. Some celebrities feel it is a violation of personal boundaries. 2. Distortion and misrepresentation: V.S. Naipaul claimed that interviews reduce his complex thoughts to 'snippets and quotes.' The process strips away nuance and context. 3. The celebrity's sense of dignity: Rudyard Kipling called it 'an immoral institution.' He and his wife detested being interviewed, seeing it as an imposition. 4. The interview creates a false persona: Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in Wonderland' fame) refused to be photographed or interviewed, feeling that the public image created was not truly him. 5. A kind of 'diminishment': Some celebrities (like those described by Silvester) feel that being interviewed makes them somehow less than they are — reducing a complex person to a few sensational quotes. 6. Umberto Eco specifically: When asked how he finds time to be so productive, Eco wittily explains that he uses the 'interstices' — the 'empty spaces' in his schedule that others waste. This reveals his own pragmatic, philosophical relationship with time rather than a dislike of interviews.

In his interview with Mukund Padmanabhan (a journalist from The Hindu), Umberto Eco explained his extraordinary productivity by referring to the concept of 'interstices' — the empty spaces or gaps in one's schedule. What he said: Eco explained that he was not a professor who merely wrote novels on the side, nor was he a novelist who happened to be a professor. He was a full academic scholar, a full novelist, a full semiotician, and a full essayist — each role complete in itself. When asked how he found the time to do all this, Eco explained that his secret was using the 'interstices' of time — the small gaps that exist between activities. For example, while waiting for someone who is ten minutes late, or while waiting for the lift, most people simply waste those minutes. Eco fills them — he carries work with him, jots down ideas, writes notes. 'I write in the interstices,' he said. What it reveals about his personality: 1. Extraordinary discipline and focus: Eco is not waiting for large, uninterrupted blocks of time. He makes productive use of every small fragment of time available. 2. Intellectual restlessness: He cannot be idle. His mind is always working — noting, observing, creating. 3. Pragmatic philosophy: Rather than complaining about not having enough time (as most people do), Eco has found a practical philosophical solution — redefining 'available time' to include the normally wasted gaps. 4. Humour and self-awareness: His answer is delivered with characteristic wit — he recognises the absurdity of his own productivity and finds a playful way to explain it. 5. Integration of work and life: For Eco, thinking and writing are not separate from living — they happen simultaneously.

The interview with Umberto Eco touches on the fascinating relationship between his academic scholarship and his popular fiction: 1. Two worlds, one mind: Eco is both a world-renowned academic semiotician (professor at the University of Bologna, author of major theoretical works on semiotics and medieval aesthetics) and the author of internationally bestselling novels like 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum.' He insists that he is fully both — not half of each. 2. The novel grew from the academic: 'The Name of the Rose,' his most famous novel, grew out of his academic interest in the Middle Ages, monasteries, and scholastic philosophy. The research he had done as an academic directly fed into the richness of the novel's historical detail and intellectual texture. 3. Fiction as a vehicle for ideas: Eco's novels are dense with philosophical, historical, and semiotic ideas. He uses the form of the thriller or mystery novel to explore serious intellectual questions — the nature of truth, the limits of interpretation, the relationship between power and knowledge. His fiction is inseparable from his scholarship. 4. Popular success does not compromise scholarship: Despite selling millions of copies, Eco's novels make intellectual demands on their readers — they include Latin passages, philosophical puzzles, and historical detail. He refuses to dumb down for a popular audience. 5. The interview reveals his view that categories like 'academic' and 'novelist' are artificial and limiting — a truly creative mind can operate in multiple domains simultaneously without any contradiction.