Chapter 7 The Interview Solutions
Question - 1 : - What are some of the positive views on interviews?
Answer - 1 : -
The positive views on interviews are that it is a medium of communication and a source of truth and information. Some even look at it as an art. These days we know about the celebrities and others through their interviews.
Question - 2 : - Why do most celebrity writers despise being interviewed?
Answer - 2 : -
Most celebrity writers despise being interviewed because they look at interviews as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives. They feel that it diminishes them. They feel that they are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves. They consider interviews immoral and a crime, and an unwanted and unwelcome interruption in their personal life.
Question - 3 : - What is the belief in some primitive cultures about being photographed?
Answer - 3 : -
Some primitive cultures consider taking a photographic portrait is like stealing the persons’s soul and diminishing him.
Question - 4 : - What do you understand by the expression ‘thumbprints on his windpipe’?
Answer - 4 : -
Saul Bellow once described interviews as being like ‘thumbprints on his windpipe’. It means he treated interviews as a painful experience, as something that caught him by his windpipe, squeezed him and left indelible thumbprints on that. It also means that when the interviewer forces personal details from his interviewee, it becomes undesirable and cruel.
Question - 5 : - Who, in today’s world, is our chief source of information about personalities?
Answer - 5 : -
The interviewer is the chief source of information in today’s world. Our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are based on communication that comes from them. Thus, interviewers hold a position of power and influence.
Question - 6 : - Do you think Umberto Eco likes being interviewed? Give reasons for your opinion.
Answer - 6 : -
Umberto Eco does not think highly of interviewers who he thinks are a puzzled bunch of people. He has reasons for thinking so as they have often interpreted him as a novelist and clubbed him with Pen Clubs and writers, while he considers himself an academic scholar who attends academic conferences and writes novels on Sundays.
Question - 7 : - How does Eco find the time to write so much?
Answer - 7 : -
Eco humorously states that there are a lot of empty spaces in his life. He calls them ‘interstices’. There are moments when one is waiting for the other. In that empty space, Eco laughingly states that he writes an article. Then he states that he is a professor who writes novels on Sundays.
Question - 8 : - What was distinctive about Eco’s academic writing style?
Answer - 8 : -
Umberto’s writings have an ethical and philosophical element underlying them. His non-fictional writing work has a certain playful and personal quality about it. Even his writings for children deal with non-violence and peace. This style of writing makes reading his novels and essays interesting and being like the reading of most academic writings. His works are marked by an informal and narrative aspect.
Question - 9 : - Did Umberto Eco consider himself a novelist first or an academic scholar?
Answer - 9 : -
Umberto identified himself with the academic community, a professor who attended academic conferences rather than meetings of Pen Clubs. In fact, he was quite unhappy that the people referred to him as a novelist.
Question - 10 : - What is the reason for the huge success of the novel, The Name of the Rose?
Answer - 10 : -
The success of The Name of the Rose, though a mystery to the author himself, could possibly be because it offered a difficult reading experience to the kind of readers who do not want easy reading experiences and those who look at novels as a machine for generating interpretations. For the same reason, the sale of his novel was underestimated by his American publishers, while the readers actually enjoyed the difficult reading experience that was offered bv Umberto Eco by raising questions about truth and the order of the worid.