The Irish stew according to Jerome K. Jerome: a recipe for kitsch

Abstract

In 1889, Jerome K. Jerome published Three Men in a Boat, a special kind of travelogue. As the gluttonous heroes make food their main preoccupation, the modest excursion on the Thames quickly turns into a heroic-comic quest. The Grail here is alternatively a jar of mustard or a missing pie, while the adversaries the heroes face are nothing more than a recalcitrant kettle, an uncooperative tin of pineapple or a stinking cheese. Among the various culinary adventures of the characters, the preparation of a curious Irish stew then appears as a key to the story. The recipe for the novel's humour can be found in this disgusting mixture of dubious ingredients, including a dead rat: an indigestible blend of heterogeneous styles that produces deliberate bad taste. What does Jerome's Irish stew symbolise, if not semantic heterogeneity, the overload and saturation of signs, inauthenticity and the negation of drama – in other words, the main characteristics of kitsch? By combining a historical and stylistic approach, the article proposes to analyse the use of kitsch as a humorous device, and to place Jerome's novel in a literary history of deliberate bad taste in works written with an unreliable first-person narrator, dating back to the writings of the Scriblerians in the eighteenth century.