With a simple diagram placed in the New York World in 1913, the early twentieth century saw the invention of the crossword puzzle. Although the New York Times did not allow it to appear in its Sunday magazine until 1942, the crossword puzzle had well before then gained widespread popularity. It had also become something of a cultural sign, of the trivialization of mass culture, in much the way that novels had some two hundred years earlier. Crossword puzzles were seen as inane time wasters, providing empty pleasures.
But they also quickly became seen as a sign for modernist art, an interpretive frame for understanding modernist aesthetics. As Catherine Turner notes, an item in the Bookman’s ‘Gossip Shop’ refers to an “avid crossword puzzlist named ‘Miss Petherbridge’ decides to begin writing fiction. Since she can’t use the vocabulary she has gained in ordinary conversation, ‘I’m going to imitate James Joyce and put it all into one novel'” (“The Gossip Shop” Bookman 63 (April 1920): 256).
The crossword puzzle, understood as a particular manifestation of pleasure, became a sign for a particular kind of theory-driven aesthetic practice, in which the thin pleasures of comprehension and meaning-creation replaced emotional expression and larger human values. As Paul Jordan Smith wrote in 1927 of Ulysses, where the reader “expected to find a story of love and ambition and struggle, he finds a bewildering crossword puzzle” (15).