Robbie Kubala’s excellent paper on “The Aesthetics of Crosswords” talks about three sources of aesthetic value in a crossword: “the aesthetic experience of struggling for and hitting upon the right solution… the visual appeal of grid art[,] and the poetic delight of idiomatic language” (p.1, all references to the linked version). I want to talk about another kind of aesthetic experience that arises from the interplay of these sources. A puzzle that’s not extraordinary in any one of these aspects can become extraordinary because of the challenge it poses to the puzzle constructor, and because the solver appreciates the challenge for the constructor. The solver has an aesthetic experience of the constructor’s craft over and above the challenge of the puzzle or the aesthetic appeal of its language or art.1
I’ll focus on cryptic crosswords, whose clues or usually consist of a phrase or sentence, known as the “surface,” where one part defines the answer and the other part gives it through wordplay. Much of the pleasure of these crosswords comes from the way that they try to trick the solver by disguising the join between the two parts, coming up with definitions that play a different role than the words play in the surface, and working out the wordplay–overcoming the challenge.
Kubala (pp. 11-12) discusses two clues for REARM: “Stern men at first prepare for another battle” and “Once again, prime minister’s back in the papers.” As he says, the first clue is fine but the second is better, at least for the experienced solver. The experienced solver can immediately process “men at first” as M, “prepare for another battle” as the likely definition, and then “stern” as REAR will likely come quickly (though its meaning in the surface is different from its meaning in the wordplay). For the second clue, where R is “minster’s” back in REAM for “the papers,” it’s harder to see that “Once again, prime” is the definition, instead of “prime minister” being a unit (it could be PM reversed for MP).2 Making it trickier makes it more satisfying to solve.
On the other hand, consider 15 down from today’s Guardian puzzle by Philistine (spoilers): “Choose Pinot? (3)”. An experienced solver can get this right away. There’s one three-letter word that always comes up for “choose”: OPT.3 But even if this is what solvers call a write-in, it’s a great clue. I thought, “But how can Pinot possibly be ‘OPT'” and then I saw it: P in OT.
What makes this clue great isn’t the difficulty for me, as a solver. It’s the elegance of the way the definition and wordplay fit in an unremarkable two-word phrase. That was surely hard for the composer (Philistine) to come up with, and as a solver I appreciate that.
The idiomatic language is important here, but it’s not intrinsically valuable. An ad writer who proposed the slogan “Choose Pinot” would get fired for dullness. What makes the language aesthetically pleasing is the way the wordplay fits it. It exhibits Nguyen‘s harmony of solution for the constructor, who found an idiomatic phrase that packed a definition and wordplay into the smallest possible space.
Similarly with grid art. Most grid art is not intrinsically aesthetically pleasing. Unlike crossword art (gift link), you wouldn’t hang even a representational crossword grid in a museum. The grid is impressive because the constructor matched the puzzle to it with an appropriate theme. Which is impressive only because it adds some constraint and difficulty to the construction. (Not to the solution! If anything it makes it easier.) A sunflower-themed crossword laid over a reproduction of van Gogh’s Sunflowers would be more visually appealing than one constructed on a sunflower-shaped grid, but it would just be a cheap trick.
These nicely constructed puzzles exhibit harmony of solution in that the constructor found something that exactly fit their constraints. But they can also have another kind of harmony, of unexpected connection. The clue for OPT brings us to see a connection between the words “choose” and “Pinot” that we’d never have noticed, if the puzzle hadn’t prompted us to disassemble “Pinot” and reassemble it. It’s like a satisfying rhyme.
Many aesthetic experiences rely on unexpected connection. A brilliant metaphor or penetrating psychological insight can connect two concepts that we wouldn’t have brought together. Maybe these connections are more profound than the ones we find in crossword clues. We haven’t learned anything deep about choice and wine from the clue, only a surface connection between the words. Few crosswords have ever moved someone to tears that weren’t tears of frustration.4 Still, it can be extremely satisfying to see the pieces click together, and the same kind of satisfaction we get from other works of art.
- To clear up how the aesthetic evaluation works, the idea is that the puzzle gives the solver aesthetic experiences, which which makes the puzzle itself aesthetically valuable. Kubala (p. 9) cites Aaron Smuts (“Are Videogames Art?“, p. 6) as arguing that crossword puzzles unlike chess cannot be art, because they have a unique solution. This argument of Smuts’s seems like it might show that crossword solving cannot be an art, unlike chess playing; someone watching a chess player might appreciate a uniquely beautiful move, whereas someone watching a crossword solver cannot appreciate a uniquely beautiful answer on the part of the solver, for no answers are unique. After his brief discussion of chess and crosswords, Smuts turns to art in video games that “involves not the playing but the making” (p. 6); his argument might be able to accommodate a similar distinction for crossword puzzles.
(Beautiful play itself should be possible in some video games, which I am saying mostly as a pretext to link this trick I pulled off in Crayon Physics Deluxe. “Elegant” is an objective valuation there–the game uses that for solutions that use only one movable object–but as you can see, solutions can also be “Awesome,” which is a purely aesthetic evaluation that you are supposed to apply yourself, and that is required for certain unlocks.) ↩︎ - Honestly, I find “the papers” slightly unfair, since the “the” isn’t doing anything. Surfaces are often written in something like headlinese where “back in papers” might be fine. It may depend on the conventions of a particular puzzle venue and how tolerant it is of linking words that don’t figure in the roleplay but make the surface smoother. ↩︎
- Or “Pinot” could be RED, but it isn’t. ↩︎
- Maybe the crossword at the beginning of the father’s novel in I Capture the Castle? But of course that’s fiction. ↩︎
Saucers of Mud 
