Cryptic crosswords and aesthetics

I love wordplay, but loathe cryptic crosswords. This essay is an attempt to figure out why.

Form follows function

Here is an ordinary sentence in plain English:

The Greek five elements are sometimes associated with the five platonic solids. Source: (Wikipedia: Classical element)

This is a good, functional sentence. It delivers some information, and nothing more. Few people would describe such a sentence as beautiful or artful, but an article composed of such sentences would be considered well-written.

Here is a photograph of the Oxford University Press building: Source: Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 3.0

Like the plain English sentence above, this photograph would not be considered especially artistic, but it represents its subject well. If somebody wanted to know what the OUP building looked like, this photograph would do the job.

Wordplay

“Hurry up and get to the back of the ship,” Tom said sternly.

is an example of wordplay, again from Wikipedia. This sentence has a plain reading: Tom is telling somebody to move to the back of a ship. Like the sentence about the Greek elements, it delivers information. If I wanted to know what Tom said, this sentence would do the job. However, the added pun makes the sentence simultaneously functional and entertaining.

Crucially, it’s not possible to separate the wordplay from the function. Consider:

The back of a ship is called the stern. Tom said something sternly.

The pun without the content would seem contrived or nonsensical. The function of the sentence is essential to the word play. Without it, there would be nothing to play on.

The Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world:

Like the photograph of the OUP building, the Mona Lisa has a “plain reading”: it’s a painting of a woman. If you wanted to know what Lisa del Giocondo looked like, the painting would show you. However, like the example of wordplay above, the Mona Lisa is more than just a functional representation. Most people would consider the Mona Lisa an exceptional piece of art. The Mona Lisa delivers an extra payload of emotional content on top of the simple representational content. Also like wordplay, it would be impossible to have the Mona Lisa without the functional content. da Vinci could not have simply painted an enigmatic smile “in the abstract”. The function is an essential substrate for the artistic purpose.

Form without function

Abstract art is art which does not refer visually to something real. It is form without function:

Piet Mondrian: Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow.

Many people enjoy abstract art. I do. I wouldn’t mind having a Mondrian hanging on my bedroom wall. However, I (and most people) don’t enjoy abstract art in the same way as we enjoy the Mona Lisa. The Mondrian above does not have any embedded meaning, or emotional effect. It is simply aesthetically pleasing decoration.

It can be fun to “interpret” abstract art; some people get entire PhDs out of doing so. But such interpretation is rarely done with the attitude of, say, a doctor interpreting a patient’s symptoms, where there exists a definite fact to be discovered. It is rare that there is an unambiguous “message” in a piece of abstract art, or a simple and correct means of extracting that message.

Here is an example of a cryptic crossword clue from Wikipedia:

Apostle’s friend outside of university (4).

The answer is “Paul”. To obtain the answer, you take the word “pal” (“friend”) and wrap the letters (“outside of”) around the letter “u” (“university”).

So my question is: why should I enjoy “solving” this “clue”?

Perhaps I should enjoy it as wordplay? But cryptic crossword clues are not wordplay. They do not have the aesthetic appeal of a plain sentence with a clever pun, because they were not plain sentences to begin with. “Apostle’s friend outside of university”, while a grammatically correct sentence, does not refer to anything. There is no friend of an apostle standing outside a university to be wittily spoken of. It’s cleverness in a vacuum; the Mona Lisa smile hanging in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s.

Perhaps, then, cryptic crosswords are like abstract art: aesthetically pleasing in their own right, with no need for a deeper meaning. For the first few cryptic crossword clues I ever solved, this was true. They were interesting novelties, and solving them gave the same mild amusement as inventing “interpretations” for abstract art. But this soon grows tiring, because unlike abstract art, most cryptic crossword clues have no decorative appeal; you wouldn’t hang them on your bedroom wall. Moreover, unlike most abstract art, a cryptic crossword clue insists that there is a “correct” interpretation, and it forces you to find it.

This might be interesting if, in the sense of a doctor examining a patient, you had good reason to believe that there really is a correct interpretation of the facts at hand. But there is not, because cryptic crossword clues do not have any real-world referents; they are all pun and no content, all form and no function. It is like having an abstract artist contemptuously tell you “no, wrong again!” as you nervously try to guess the “correct” meaning of his Three dolls' heads nailed to a vending machine. It is make-work: digging holes and filling them in again for no clear purpose.

And who wants to do that?