Puzzle #248: Episode Guide (Crossmess Parzel #4)

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa had a lot in common with Joyce; they were both visionaries who espoused what might be called a "critical nationalism" with respect to their home countries, and they even both participated in puzzle contests (Pessoa did so under the name A. A. Cross). But Pessoa was no fan of Joyce, complaining that Joyce's writing "is preoccupied with method, with how it is made." He added that the sensuality of Ulysses is "oneiric delirium - the kind treated by psychiatrists - presented as an end in itself."

It's true that Ulysses is a forbiddingly methodical novel, one that uses a dizzying range of styles and techniques. It's the polystylistic nature of Ulysses that makes it hard to compare to a crossword, though many have approached it as a puzzle. In a crossword, thematic unity is key: a single, consistently executed theme is generally treated as the hallmark of a good puzzle. That's a metric that I've brazenly ignored in this Ulysses-inspired crossword (pdf, puz, pdf solution). It's a 25x25 grid with 18 sections, each corresponding to one of the 18 episodes of the novel, and each one having a conceit inspired by that episode. Don't worry, familiarity with Ulysses isn't required to solve the puzzle (though it will surely help in some sections). If you're curious what the heck is going on in a particular section, I've included a handy section-by-section guide below the puzzle.

Thanks to Frisco, Richard, and Matthew for test-solving this beast!

Built by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free crossword puzzle creator

 

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Episode 1, "Telemachus"

The symbol of the cross is the first image in Ulysses, which begins "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed." But the symbol of the broken mirror is also a motif in Episode 1 (representing, according to Stephen Dedalus, the warped state of Irish art). So the puzzle opens with the image of a broken mirror crossing a razor.

Episode 2, "Nestor"

This episode depicts Stephen as a teacher at a boys' school, drilling his students with rote questions about ancient history, so the entries in the second section of the puzzle are clued in the same way.

Episode 3, "Proteus"

Episode 3 is named for Proteus, the mythological shapeshifter, and the third section of the puzzle is made up only of the letters in PROTEUS.

Episode 4, "Calypso"

Episode 4 is the first major introduction of the theme of bodily appetites, and the entries in this section are all related to food and drink.

Episode 5, "Lotus-Eaters"

This episode is inspired by the episode of The Odyssey in which Odysseus's crew eat lotus flowers and become intoxicated, losing all desire to continue their journey home. The episode also portrays the wandering and digressive thoughts of Leopold Bloom. The entries in this section are all related to the motif of intoxication, and are all interrupted before they can finish.

Episode 6, "Hades"

Episode 6 includes the first of several mentions in the novel of the phrase "retrospective arrangement," which critics often use to refer to the way in which passages in the novel serves as echoes of previous episodes. In this section, each entry is clued with a cross-reference to an entry in a previous section.

Episode 7, "Aeolus"

This episode is interspersed with newspaper headlines, so the clues in this section are written in the style of headlines.

Episode 8, "Lestrygonians"

Like Episode 4, "Lestrygonians" is filled with references to food, and Joyce's schema for Ulysses lists "peristaltic prose" as the technique used in this episode, with the contractions of the digestive system serving as a model for Bloom's post-lunch walk through Dublin. In this section, the letter bank from Episode 4 above is reused, as if the foods are traveling through the digestive system.

Episode 9, "Scylla & Charybdis"

In this episode, Stephen delivers a lecture on Hamlet, and the episode is dense with Shakespeare references, so each clue in this section is a reference to Shakespeare.

Episode 10, "Wandering Rocks"

This episode consists of 18 short vignettes using the technique of interpolation, in which passages from one vignette reappear in the middle of another vignette. A letter is interpolated into each entry in this section. (MAC becoming MASC is also a nod to the "man in the macintosh," mentioned in the writeup to the second puzzle in the series.)

Episode 11, "Sirens"

The prose in Episode 11 attempts to imitate the qualities of music, so this section of the puzzle is filled with musical references (and repeats the C, R, and N sounds in a hopefully quasi-musical way).

Episode 12, "Cyclops"

Episode 12 is a story narrated by an unnamed Dubliner, unusually using first-person "I" narration. Since the episode is named after the Cyclops, every entry in this section includes the letter "I" exactly once.

Episode 13, "Nausicaa"

In this episode, Bloom masturbates to the sight of Gerty MacDowell, a woman he sees on the beach. Before Bloom's climax, Gerty is characterized with an over-the-top cavalcade of references to beauty and fashion, but that sense of beauty fades afterwards as Gerty walks away and is revealed to walk with a limp. The Across entries above and below CLIMAX in this section are thematic nods to those descriptions.

Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun"

This section recapitulates the stylistic history of English prose, shifting between styles every few paragraphs. The Across clues in this section imitate five of the styles from the episode, ranging from early Latinate prose to Gothic horror.

Episode 15, "Circe"

This episode is written as a surrealistic stage play set during Bloom and Dedalus's visit to Dublin's red-light district. The clues in this section are written as if they were part of that play.

Episode 16, "Eumaeus"

This episode is deliberately written in a stilted, overwritten style, with some critics arguing that it imitates the way that Bloom himself would have written it. The clues in this section are written deliberately poorly.

Episode 17, "Ithaca"

This episode is written as a catechism (a theological question-and-answer session, essentially), so the clues are written as questions. The answer to the final question in the episode is a large dot printed on the page, referenced by the PERIOD rebus square.

Episode 18, "Penelope"

The final episode is a stream-of-consciousness representation of the thoughts of Bloom's wife Molly, so the clues and entries are in a continuous stream that doesn't break at the boundaries between entries. The partial clue at 123-Across, [yes], is a nod to the fact that "yes" is both the first and last word of the episode.

Puzzle #247: Four Last Things (Crossmess Parzel #3)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's outline of his own early life through the avatar of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. It begins with his childhood (announced by the opening words, "Once upon a time") and tracks his oscillations between periods of hedonism and deep religiosity. Perhaps the centerpiece of Portrait is the scene where Stephen listens to Father Arnall's sermon on the Four Last Things - death, judgment, hell, and heaven. This sermon is the impetus for Stephen to abandon sensual pursuits and return to the Catholic Church, but that return is short-lived; the confines of the church (and of Irish culture writ large) can't accommodate his artistic ambitions. When he sees a girl bathing along Dollymount Strand, he (in one of Joyce's characteristic epiphanies) experiences an intense urge to describe her beauty in prose. He becomes further alienated from both the church and from his homeland, realizing in the end that his aesthetic ambitions are incompatible with a life in Ireland.

But he still retains a deep love for his homeland, and hopes to help craft a new Irish identity through his writing. He concludes the novel by writing: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Inspired by the Four Last Things, this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) charts the four major aspects of Dedalus/Joyce's life in Portrait: childhood development, Catholic faith, sensualism, and finally aestheticism - an aestheticism that, as we will see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, aims to radically break free from all sorts of strictures.

Made by Will Nediger with the online cross word maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

June 22: Untitled (Sarah Sinclair, The Atlantic)

June 25: Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher, AVCX)

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Untitled (Sarah Sinclair)

With people like Caleb Madison, Paolo Pasco, and Kelsey Dixon contributing, the Atlantic crossword has been reliably great. But they recently entered their open-submissions-for-themelesses era, and judging by this puzzle, it's going to be a fun era. I always marvel at the quality and quantity of original question-mark clues that tend to appear in Paolo's Thursday and Friday puzzles, and this puzzle achieves a similar feat on a 15x15 scale: [Forehead lines?] for FACE TATTOO, [Team covering the spread?] for CATERERS, [Smartest person in the room, perhaps] for FASHIONISTA, [Spotty coverage?] for PIMPLE PATCH, and [Images from a wanted poster?] for THIRST TRAPS are highlights.

The clues for short fill keep things interesting, too; [Word that distinguishes the title of an H. G. Wells novel from the title of a Ralph Ellison novel] is a fun way to clue THE and a great example of how duplicating the answer in the clue (twice, even!) can sometimes be perfectly fine. I particularly like the zaniness of the DURER clue, [Great Piece of Turf artist Albrecht whose last name is fittingly found in verdure rendered]. "Aptly hidden in" clues are often awkwardly strained, but "verdure rendered" is such a striking phrase that this one loops around to being delightful to me. Plus, Great Piece of Turf really is notable for being a masterpiece of verdure-rendering.

Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher)

It's not like this theme type (substrings of theme entries dropping vertically, in this case words for beans) hasn't been done many times before (it feels like the WSJ has this kind of theme every few weeks). But I'm stunned by the smartness of the execution here. Each spilled bean (LIMA in MUSLIM AMERICAN, COCOA in ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE, and SOY in JUST SO YOU KNOW) is split across words in a phrase that would be an asset in a themeless puzzle, which is a great start. But also, this kind of theme is very hard to fill cleanly around, because the theme words are intersecting and the "spilled" words can't be placed symmetrically even if the puzzle itself is symmetrical, which constrains the black square placement a lot. To keep the fill squeaky-clean in this kind of puzzle, grid patterns sometimes end up feeling cramped.

Here, we've got nice chunky stacks of 6s, 7s, and 8s, but placed in a way that allowed Olivia and Sally to come up with a clean, lively fill. The NE and SW corners are particularly canny, breaking up a stack of three 8s with a single black square so that the corners themselves are only 3x3, allowing for fun long stuff (TIRAMISU, ROOT BEER, RAINCOAT, OM NOM NOM) while retaining a lot of flexibility with the crossings. (And I'll note that I only now, while writing this up, noticed that the grid is slightly asymmetrical, with a black square on only one side of ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE in the center row. The grid still has the aesthetically pleasing features of a fully symmetrical grid, but allows the fabulous hidden COCOA find to take center stage.) Elsewhere, we've got the stacked 7s DANGLED and APPROVE and ANEMONE and REDEYES, again with the crossings all being unimpeachable. Just wonderful gridwork.

Puzzle #246: Epiphanies (Crossmess Parzel #2)

I don't know if James Joyce ever solved crosswords, though on at least one occasion he did enter a puzzle competition in an English magazine in hopes of earning some money. The competition, with a 250-pound prize, involved deciphering a set of 48 words in batches of six. Joyce, who was living in Trieste at the time, sent his complete entry to his brother Stanislaus in a registered envelope so he would have proof that he had completed it, with the plan to sue the magazine if they didn't award him the prize. The plan failed because of the slowness of the mail delivery from Trieste to Dublin, but I'm left to wonder about the alternate history in which Joyce became a word puzzle fiend.

He was, of course, a wordplay fiend, as is evident from his late novels. But in daily life, too, he displayed a penchant for the kind of wordplay that's the stock-in-trade of crossword constructors. An Irish writer friend of his, Frank O'Connor, recalled once visiting Joyce and remarking on a landscape that was displayed on his wall in an unusual-looking frame. He asked what it was, and Joyce replied "That's cork." O'Connor, who was a native of the Irish city of Cork, said "I know it's Cork, but what's the frame made of?" In reference to Joyce's visual pun, O'Connor later reflected that Joyce must have suffered from some sort of "assocation mania." The complex chains of wordplay associations in Finnegans Wake put me in mind of Freud's account of parapraxes - verbal slips that arise from an unconscious train of associations. Joyce apparently didn't think much of Freud, though in a characteristic bit of wordplay, he did note that his own name comes from joyeux and is thus the French equivalent of Freud (from Freude, meaning "joy"). Still, I think it's undeniable that there's a strong literary kinship between Joyce and Freud. (Lionel Trilling: "James Joyce, with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words as things and of words which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.")

That use of "words which point to more than one thing" is the bread and butter of the crossword constructor. In that sense, one of the most cruciverbal puzzles in Joyce's work is the "man in the macintosh," a mysterious figure who pops up at various points in Ulysses. At one point, a newspaper reporter misinterprets this description and assumes that he's a man named M'Intosh. In his novel The House of Ulysses, Julián Ríos takes this wordplay one step further and reinterprets him as the man with the Macintosh, typing away on his computer.

This sort of thing was mostly to come later in his career, though. His early books, like Dubliners, were much less linguistically playful. At this point, Joyce was working out his concept of the "epiphany." He used this term for some of his early, very short prose pieces, which were either prose poems or sketches of overheard conversations. But he also structured several of the stories in Dubliners around the sort of epiphany that he defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation," such as Gabriel Conroy's moment of self-understanding occasioned by his realization of the depth of his wife's feeling for her deceased lover in "The Dead." In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen feels a duty as an artist to record these fleeting realizations for posterity. There's an affinity here with the epiphanic moment of hearing a phrase and realizing exactly how it can work as a crossword revealer, and the parallel epiphany that, hopefully, the solver experiences.

The epiphany is a small, crystalline moment, and it seems appropriate here to make a Dubliners-esque collection of such epiphanies. So this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is a series of revealers for which I haven't found enough theme entries to make a full theme - in each case, there's just one theme entry for each revealer. I couldn't turn any of them into full-blown puzzles, but, like Stephen, I also don't want to let them evanesce.

Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword creator from Amuse Labs

Puzzle #245: A Series of Gig Lamps Symmetrically Arranged (Crossmess Parzel #1)

In the essay "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf famously wrote that "life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." She charges English novelists of the previous several decades, particularly H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, with failing to truly tackle the complexities of life, focusing instead on the ephemeral and material. Among her contemporaries who are valiantly attempting to represent the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of human experience (to borrow a phrase from William James), she cites James Joyce as the most notable. Joyce, she writes, is "concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain." (Mind you, she wrote those words before Ulysses was finished, and her later assessments were much less positive - when she finally read it, she called it "pretentious" and "underbred.")

The words "symmetrically arranged" naturally jumped out at me, since it's a standard rule of crosswords that the theme entries should, in general, be symmetrically arranged. A typical crossword theme, indeed, is little more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. The theme can be elevated by the craftsmanship of the grid, but in a way perhaps that's even more pernicious - to Woolf, Bennett is the worst example of empty materialism precisely because he's such an excellent craftsman that there are no cracks for life to worm itself inside.

I generally think of myself as an excellent cruciverbal craftsman. I've been at this a long time, and I know how to fill a grid cleanly and smoothly without the seams showing. So I certainly know how to make a decidedly un-Joycean crossword. Over the next few puzzles, I'll be working my cruciverbal way through Joyce's major works, with one puzzle inspired by each of his books of fiction. But first, here's a puzzle that's nothing more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged (pdf, puz, pdf solution).

Made by Will Nediger with the free crossword puzzle builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

May 30: Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Puzzles)

June 1: Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen, A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle)

June 5: Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx, Puzzmo)

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Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin)

"Off the Wall" is aptly chosen - there's such an eclectic mix of goofy stuff in this themeless grid. DEYASSIFIES (clued as [Makes plain?]), SHAQTIN' A FOOL, THIS IS SPARTA, RECESSION POP, GOSH DARN IT (and, indeed, GOOFIER). I love this kind of grid shape with criss-crossing long entries, where the marquee stuff isn't confined to stacks. They're very hard to fill, and this is an object lesson in why it can be worthwhile to have a couple of entries like AGCY and SHA and AFTS in the short fill if it enables such a delightful solving experience overall.

Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen)

In case you missed it, you should check out A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle, a pack of puzzles by trans and nonbinary constructors in support of transgender charities. This puzzle was my favorite of the bunch, with some striking grid art that somehow still caught me by surprise when I got to the revealer, T4T ([Dating initialism reflected in the shapes in this grid]). And indeed, three chunks of black squares cascading down the grid are shaped like a T, a 4, and another T. I love it when there's an unexpected numeral in a revealer! The rest of the grid is packed with trans-related clues and entries, from HYPERVISIBILITY and WACHOWSKI to IT'S A GIRL, clued as ["Surprise" for some trans adults hosting their own gender reveal parties]. Particularly elegant is the stack of 5s in the top right: LABEL, clued as [Identify, in a way some queer people avoid], ARIEL, clued as [Disney character who famously underwent a transition giving her a major vocal change], and BOOKS, clued as ["Nevada" by Imogen Binnie and "The Death of Vivek Oji" by Akwaeke Emezi, for two].

There's also just an assorted range of delights to be found throughout the puzzle, like the linguistically fascinating BAKA - ["Fool" in Japanese (literally "horse-deer," describing a guy who would confuse the two] - which I don't think I've seen in a puzzle before. Or the original clues for common entries, like [Part of the psyche grounded in reality, or a sense of smugness that isn't] for EGO.

Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx)

I've seen a lot of themelesses with 4x10 stacks lately - it's a form I particularly associate with Adrian Johnson, who's made some excellent ones. Having constructed a couple myself now, I really get the appeal: they look eye-popping in a grid, but they're surprisingly tractable to construct cleanly (helped, possibly, by the fact that the average quality of 4s tends to be higher than that of 3s). When you're making a symmetrical themeless grid, though, making one 4x10 stack means that you have to make another one on the other side of the grid, so sometimes you get one stellar stack and one that's not quite so good.

A key part of Puzzmo's editorial ethos, though, is that there are no strict requirements for grid dimensions or symmetry, which helps make sure that every grid is the right size and layout for its purpose, whether it's themed or themeless. So there's nothing stopping a Puzzmo constructor from making one beautiful 4x10 stack and extending the grid just as much as necessary to make the themeless work. That's just what jqzx has done here, with a stack of BASIC CABLE/ART THERAPY/SCREEN TIME/HEADMASTER, where all the crossings are unimpeachable - the least good, if I had to pick was NOSTRA, but I even enjoyed that one, clued as it is with reference to Carlos Fuentes's masterpiece, Terra Nostra. The best crossings are the pair of FALSE STARTS and TAKES THE BAIT, which in turn cross the mini stack of UNDERBAKED and TOMFOOLERY. Just fantastic gridwork. And it feels very atypical of Puzzmo to me, since so few of their puzzles are wide-open themelesses - but in a more important sense, it's very typical of Puzzmo in its efficient use of grid space and design.

Puzzle #244: The Uprights

Back again with a tricksy puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - happy solving!

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's cross word maker