The Irish stew according to Jerome K. Jerome: a recipe for kitsch PDF Free Download
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https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR.2025.13.1.975
The European Journal of
Humour Research 13 (1) 162-171
www.europeanjournalofhumour.org
The Irish stew according to Jerome K. Jerome: a
recipe for kitsch
Hélène Dubail
Université Paris Nanterre, France
helene.dubail@gmail.com
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.
Keywords: humour, kitsch, unreliable first-person narrator, Jerome K. Jerome, travelogue.
1. Introduction
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) is a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British writer,
well-known for his novel Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog!), published in 1889,
frequently considered a ‘classic’ of humour (Bender, 2015, p. 156), even a ‘comic masterpiece’
(Oulton, 2012, p. 70), both in Great Britain and beyond. In Germany, the novel has long been
read in schools (Nicholas, 2007), and in France, one of the leading specialists in literary humour,
Jean-Marc Moura, includes Jerome in his list of nine writers who make up the Western ‘canon
of humour’ (Moura, 2010, p. 61). From the moment of its publication and for over a century,
the novel also enjoyed undeniable popular success, regularly renewed by its film and television
adaptations, such as the one offered by the BBC in 1975 and analysed in detail in a previous
EJHR article (Sehmby, 2014). This enduring popularity has led to an uncertain status for Three
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Men in a Boat. Where should the novel be shelved? This is the question posed by Peter Hunt,
for example, who notes similar hesitations when it comes to classifying Jerome's book or
Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (Hunt, 2002, p. 177). Is it adult literature or children's
literature? And is it really literature at all? Jerome's detractors find it difficult to reconcile
literature and popularity, literature and humour. As Carl Markgraf observes, even his admirers
struggle with this, as many critics attempt to rehabilitate Jerome by emphasizing his most serious
works (Markgraf, 1983, p. 85).
This is undoubtedly the reason for the relative neglect of the writer in literary studies, even
though there seems to have been a growing interest in Jerome’s work in recent years. He is
constantly cited as a reference in analyses of other writers, when it is pointed out that some
aspect or scene is reminiscent of Three Men in a Boat. However, this ‘great classic of English
humour’ (Moura, 2010, p. 144) has itself been little studied. In his annotated bibliography,
Markgraf struggles to cite any interesting studies of Three Men in a Boat apart from Matthew
and Green's annotated edition (Pavilion Books, 1982), which is now difficult to access, and
Nilsen’s reference guide to British humour (1998) does not even include an entry on Jerome
(Nilsen, 1998).
While Jerome's life may have interested some critics (Moss, 1928; Connolly, 1982; Oulton
2012), few have studied his writing style in detail. The characteristics of his humour have rarely
been analysed, apart from a few articles on the translation difficulties posed by his writing
(Asscher, 2010; Puşnei-Sîrbu, 2018) or on the influence that Jerome is said to have had from
American humourists (Batts, 2000). As Scheick sums up in his study of the remarkable way in
which Jerome parodied imperial narratives, the fame of Three Men in a Boat is often seen as an
aberration, because for many critics, Jerome is nothing more than an insignificant writer
(Scheick, 2007, p. 403).
It has to be said that appearances can work against Jerome. First of all, Three Men in a Boat
and its 1900 sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, which is much less famous and generally
considered weaker in style, offer quite simple stories: they are travelogues featuring a
superfluous character. Moreover, the character is called Jerome or “J.”. As we may guess, this
first name is not a tiny detail, especially in novels inspired by real excursions the novelist took
with friends. Nevertheless, he will henceforth be referred to as “J.”, to distinguish him from the
author. J. is a lazy, hypochondriac employee, who thinks he works too much and needs a holiday.
So he embarks on two trips with two companions, firstly by boat on the Thames, and secondly
by bicycle through Germany. During these journeys, nothing happens, or at least nothing really
significant. In keeping with the tradition of humorous travelogues (Sangsue, 2001, pp. 1141-
1147), these two journeys do not take J., George, Harris and Montmorency, the dog of the first
novel, to exotic places. Nor are they stories of experiences which transform the characters, the
narrative again following thus one of the basic principles of the humorous text: the absence of
plot progression, which distinguishes it from comedy, which is mechanical, and from satire,
which is ordered (Moura, 2010, pp. 124-126). These journeys serve merely as a pretext for
slapstick playlets and absurd anecdotes. Even when a sudden development occurs, the episode
ultimately appears to be of absolutely no interest.
So why take an interest in Jerome as part of a reflection on “funny taste”? The reason is
twofold: firstly, J., the strangely ridiculous alter ego of Jerome, is not only lazy and a
hypochondriac, he is also a glutton: food, and, to a lesser degree, bodily functions, are
fundamental in the first novel, serving as a key to understanding, as we shall see later. Secondly,
J. quickly turns out to be an unreliable first-person narrator (Booth, 1961, pp. 158-159),
somewhere between the clown, the picaro and the naïf, to refer to William Riggan’s
classification (Riggan, 1981). When the narrator tries to be subtle, or to propose a thorough
analysis, he tells in fact flimsy stories. When he expatiates upon something at great length, he
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lays stress on irrelevant details. When he shows off with what he thinks to be a purple patch, his
text is gaudier and clumsier than ever.
Proud, conceited, convinced of his own talent, J. writes, in fact, what can be seen as a bad
travelogue. J. is part of the tradition of the idler, which is important in the late nineteenth century.
But he also aspires to a higher social status than his own, and in this also resembles, in a way, a
democratized version of the fop, inherited from the Georgian period. J. thinks he is witty, and
wants to be seen as an author, but because of his trivial concerns, and a certain bad taste (among
other defects), he turns out to be laughable. Such a process, combining humour, bad taste and
an unreliable narrator, seems to raise a number of questions, including the following: how does
Jerome manage to turn a bad travelogue into a good novel?
Insofar as the first novel is the one in which the theme of food is the most important, and
the one in which the ambiguity of the writing is the greatest, I shall henceforth focus on Three
Men in a Boat, even if certain remarks may also apply to the second volume of the diptych.
2. Bad taste in food, bad taste in style?
Any reader discovering Jerome’s work will quickly notice that one of the main sources of
humour in Three Men in a Boat is, indeed, bad taste, whether understood in the stylistic or
culinary sense. Throughout their journey up the Thames, the characters spend their time eating,
digesting, dreaming about their next meal, stocking up on provisions and trying, with varying
degrees of difficulty, to feed themselves, if possible with unappetizing food: broken eggs,
crushed butter that has already been under the sole of a shoe and the bottom of a buttock and
which is then carried inside a teapot, or simply the water from the Thames, a drink that the
narrator swallows, telling himself that "What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get
upset over" (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 112).
Furthermore, the rare twists and turns that do occur, and that make up the slapstick scenes
mentioned earlier, often rely on unsuccessful attempts to obtain food – which has become a true
“nemesis” in the novel, as Peter Hunt describe it (Hunt, 1996, p. 12). The link between humour
and food is clear. On one occasion, J. and his companions literally fight with a recalcitrant kettle
or an uncooperative tin of pineapple; on another, they are on potato duty, which is described as
a real Herculean task; on yet another occasion, they embark on the quest for a jar of mustard or
a missing pie. Then the heroic-comic writing transforms the modest excursion into a ridiculous
epic.
But are these examples not deliberate bad taste, in the stylistic sense this time? Indeed,
among the devices used in humorous travelogues, Robin Jarvis highlights the importance of
incongruity, reflected in the traveller's failure to embody the role of explorer. Jarvis also points
out that incongruity can be found both in the object itself and in the form in which it is presented
(Jarvis, 2023, p. 10). The humour here would thus come from a discrepancy between the
intention of the writer and that of his narrator, in this case a discrepancy between their two styles,
which are nonetheless based on exactly the same words. In this superimposition of two
personalities, and therefore two styles of writing, within a single text, we can assume that the
heroic-comic tone belongs only to Jerome, who is capable of taking an amused distance; J., on
the other hand, would be quite serious, and would have decided to write a scene with an epic
tone, without realising his error of taste.
One aspect of the novel invites us to hypothesise such silliness on the part of the narrator,
and thus to draw a parallel between culinary bad taste and stylistic bad taste. I am referring to
the fact that several of the slapstick playlets told by J. clearly echo the novel itself, its structure
and writing. The characters’ behaviour mirror the text’s style. For example, the Hampton Court
labyrinth episode and the missing lock episode, when the characters manage to get lost on the
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river, are clear references to the narrator's habit of getting lost in his narrative (Byerly, 2013,
p. 117). As a worthy heir to Sterne’s characters and in particular to Yorick, from whom he could
borrow his word, “I seldom go to the place I set out for” (Sterne, 1819, p. 386), J. turns out to
be talkative and a great lover of these digressions, which often cause him to lose the thread of
the story. When the novel suddenly ends – though not in the middle of a sentence as Sterne
dared to do in A Sentimental Journey –, it is because the characters have given up on reaching
their destination.
So why should not the other anecdotes written by J. serve the same purpose? Thus, the
various episodes that deal with food can be seen as metaphors for writing itself, starting with
the famous Irish stew scene.
3. Writing as stew: the effects of contamination
3.1. Unsavoury mixtures
During their journey, the characters set about cooking an Irish stew. And since, according to the
narrator's obtuse logic, this recipe has "the advantage [...][that] you [get] rid of such a lot of
things" (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 117), the initiative turns into a disaster and results in a
disgusting dish:
We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would
be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for
precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe
side, and not try experiments.
Harris said:
“If you never try a new thing, how can you tell what it’s like? It’s men such as you that hamper the
world’s progress. Think of the man who first tried German sausage!”
It was a great success, that Irish stew. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a meal more. There was something
so fresh and piquant about it. One’s palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish
with a new flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth. (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 117)
The indigestible mixture of dubious ingredients inevitably brings to mind the way the narrator
constructs his narrative. He assembles pastiches of all kinds without worrying about whether
they fit together: for example the fabliau, the novel of chivalry, the theatrical playlet, the
allegory.
We can see such a mixture in the following passage, one of many examples. As J. and his
companions stumble across the body of a woman who has committed suicide, the narrator
imagines what might have happened, and this quickly turns into a tale worthy of Thomas Hardy's
most pessimistic plots. Just afterwards, however, J. abruptly picks up the thread of his story to
give some very down-to-earth tourist advice:
She had wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening fell and the
grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river
that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had
laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.
Thus had she sinned in all things – sinned in living and in dying. God help her! and all other sinners,
if any more there be.
Goring on the left bank and Streatley on the right are both or either charming places to stay at for a
few days. (Jerome, 2008 [1889], pp. 138-139)
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The deflation of style, which creates an impression of incongruity, is accompanied here by a
contamination effect. The account of this woman's despair, presented as a "hackneyed story"
(Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 136), is both pathetic and nonchalant. As with the ingredients of his
version of an Irish stew, J.'s stylistic assemblage ends up creating a strange sauce. Where do we
draw the line between these two passages of clashing tones? Are readers supposed to take the
story of the drowned woman seriously, and so move abruptly from self-pity to laughter? Or is
the dramatic story contaminated by the juxtaposition of humorous samples, to the point where
it in turn becomes part of the comic process, in the form of a shoddy pathos?
The genesis of the work further deepens its ambiguity. Indeed, Jerome himself explains that
his original ambition was to write a serious and educational text, a history of the Thames,
interspersed only with a few comic episodes. The work became the humorous classic it is today
because the writer ultimately found it easier to write the comic scenes, and also because
Robinson, the publisher, wanted him to favour the humorous vein (Jerome, 1926, pp. 107-108).
Such a revelation sheds new light on the text, but the ambiguity deepens when we consider that
Jerome may not be sincere in this passage of his autobiography. Scheick prevents compelling
evidence suggesting that this is probably another instance of the author distorting reality, as he
often plays with his public image and indulges in self-mockery (Scheick, 2007, p. 404). Sending
contradictory messages to heighten ambiguity, including through the paratext and the metatext
of the work, is after all a common strategy among humorous writers (Moura, 2010, pp. 139-
143).
3.2. The art of the “goût de travers”
Whether Jerome is sincere or not, whether he first acted unintentionally or whether it was all
planned from the start, the fact remains: with this change in structure, the descriptive and
didactic passages have become interludes within a humorous text, and the juxtaposition of
heterogeneous tonalities generates a bathos effect, i.e. a figure which consists of completing a
pathetic gradation with a disappointing ending. But bathos can make people laugh, as the
Scriblerians' mockery clearly showed in the eighteenth century. In 1727, their ironic treatise
Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, supposedly written by a presumptuous character,
Martinus Scriblerus, analysed the process of creating “the true goût de travers” (Pope, 1751
[1727], p. 206). The recipe seems to have been applied by Jerome. Do we not recognize the most
significant aspects of his writing in these lines from Peri Bathos?
He is to mingle bits of the most various, or discordant kinds, landscape, history, portraits, animals;
and connect them with a great deal of flourishing, by head or tail, as it shall please his imagination,
and contribute to his principal end; which is, to glare by strong oppositions of colours, and surprise
by contrariety of images. […] His design ought to be like a labyrinth, out of which no body can get
clear but himself. And since the great art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join
the credible with the surprising, our author shall produce the credible, by painting nature in her
lowest simplicity; and the surprising, by contradicting common opinion. In the very same manner
he will affect the marvellous; he will draw Achilles with the patience of Job; a prince talking like a
jack-pudding; a maid of honour selling bargains; a footman speaking like a philosopher; and a fine
gentleman like a scholar. (Pope, 1751 [1727], pp. 206-207)
With its stylistic mixture, its labyrinthine structure, or the portrait of Elizabeth I touring cabarets,
among other examples, the novel follows the principles outlined above. We might therefore ask
whether Jerome also shares this "anti-natural way of thinking", which consists in having one's
eyes "like unto the wrong end of a perspective glass, by which all the objects of nature are
lessened" (Pope, 1751 [1727], p. 208). Indeed, it is not so much the low as the high style of
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bathos that provokes Scriblerian mockery: that is, more precisely, the aspiration to the sublime
on the part of mediocre poets, an inappropriate aspiration that can only be doomed to failure.
We are therefore dealing here with a new Martinus Scriblerus, a fool who proposes all sorts
of stylistic exercises because he likes to watch himself write. We have seen the effect of bathos
in the episode of the drowned woman; there are countless examples of this. J. is also a self-
taught man with recent knowledge, superficial because it has not yet been fully assimilated. And
if he often plays the substitute victim joke in the slapstick playlets, he never questions his own
writing.
3.3. When good becomes bad
What we said about the pathetic narrative could then also apply to the lyrical passages. Here
follows an example:
Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like
sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the
harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day
breathes out her last.
From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with
noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear-guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen
feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre
throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the
pale stars, reigns in stillness.
[…] Harris said:
“How about when it rained?”
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris – no wild yearning for the unattainable.
Harris never “weeps, he knows not why.” If Harris’s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because
Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.
(Jerome, 2008 [1889], pp. 14-15)
Is this a sincere lyricism that aptly expresses nostalgia for a bygone past, or a sample of
grandiloquent, mawkish style? Apart from the combination of the very high and the very low,
do we not find in the lyrical paragraphs some of the stylistic flaws mocked by the Scriblerians,
such as the “mixture of figures” (Pope, 1751 [1727], p. 231)? Do we not find especially the
abundance of metaphors that makes Pope and his friends laugh at the verses of Richard
Blackmore, the poet of the eighteenth century whom posterity has remembered mainly for his
lack of talent?
In this kind of passage, we would be dealing with paragraphs originally written in all
seriousness by Jerome, which could now be perceived as humorous because of a contamination
effect. They would have become samples of the indigestible writing of a silly narrator, and
would be now examples of bad taste. Here again, a culinary episode can be seen as symbolic,
encouraging us to read it in this way. It is one of the most famous scenes in the novel, in which
the narrator illustrates the disadvantages of travelling with cheese.
I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool. Splendid cheeses they were,
ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been
warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in Liverpool at
the time, and my friend said that if I didn’t mind he would get me to take them back with me to
London, as he should not be coming up for a day or two himself, and he did not think the cheeses
ought to be kept much longer.
“Oh, with pleasure, dear boy,” I replied, “with pleasure.”
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[…] From Euston, I took the cheeses down to my friend’s house. When his wife came into the room
she smelt round for an instant. Then she said:
“What is it? Tell me the worst.”
I said:
“It’s cheeses. Tom bought them in Liverpool, and asked me to bring them up with me.”
[…] He threw them into the canal; but had to fish them out again, as the bargemen complained.
They said it made them feel quite faint. And, after that, he took them one dark night and left them
in the parish mortuary. But the coroner discovered them, and made a fearful fuss.
He said it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the corpses.
My friend got rid of them, at last, by taking them down to a sea-side town, and burying them on the
beach. It gained the place quite a reputation. Visitors said they had never noticed before how strong
the air was, and weak-chested and consumptive people used to throng there for years afterwards.
(Jerome, 2008 [1889], pp. 26-29)
The invasive cheese, which spreads its putrid smell everywhere, could resemble the narrator’s
style, which is seen as both funny and annoying, and which could spoil any landscape as soon
as J. begins to describe it.
When to laugh, when not to laugh? The reception of Jerome's novel reflects this ambiguity.
While some of Jerome's contemporary critics were shocked by the “vulgarity” (Jerome, 1926,
p. 74) of the humorous scenes, it now seems that it is rather the more serious-looking passages
that can provoke a certain discomfort. The unease was already evident in 1927, the year of
Jerome’s death. His obituary in the Guardian does note some “reflective, sensitive interludes”
in the novel which seem to be appreciated, but it then expresses regret at “a weakness in
[Jerome’s] earnest strivings with philosophy”, and “a certain lack of intellectual grip in his
serious works” (The Guardian, 1927). Hesitation remained. One English critic, Geoffrey
Harvey, is disturbed by the corpse episode (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. xx), another French critic,
André Topia, thinks Jerome bores his readers with long moral lessons that he deems
“distressing” (Topia, 2015, p. 43). Reflective passages tinged with philosophy, such as the one
on the “boat of life” (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 22), bothered Topia so much that the publishing
house that retranslated and republished the work on the occasion of the novel’s centenary
adopted a paradoxical strategy: highlighting the negative aspects pointed out by Jerome's
detractors, in order to arouse readers’ curiosity about this debated text (Pickford, 2007, pp. 83-
93). Thus, a reversal has occurred. If there is any doubt, it has more to do with the good taste of
the more serious passages.
4. The kitsch effect, or when responsibility is diluted
To further clarify the ambiguity of writing (and humour) in Jerome's novel, we will return one
last time to J.'s faults: he is a man who attaches great importance to appearances, who tries too
hard (he overloads his boat), who lets himself be seduced by forgeries (in one scene, he is fooled
by a plaster trout), who has heterogeneous tastes, who makes fun of tragic stories, and who
simply likes what is pretty.
Here, in fact, we find the characteristics of kitsch listed by the sociologist Jean-Pierre
Keller: the primacy of form, the overload and saturation of signs, the inauthenticity, the semantic
heterogeneity, the negation of dramaturgy, and the affinity with the pretty to the detriment of
the beautiful (Keller, undated). Indeed, kitsch creates “a world that is made for me, that is
friendly, comfortable and immediately understandable” (Beyaert-Geslin, 2006); yet, to others,
it appears incongruous, a jumble of mismatched elements – where even the choice of materials
feels inappropriate – conveying contradictory messages.
Is it possible, then, that Jerome has given us a text whose humour is based above all on
ironic kitsch; in other words, on deliberately bad taste? Firstly, Jerome himself addresses the
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question of kitsch in his novel, when he mentions, for example, the case of the little porcelain
dog:
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes
blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability
carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it
irritates me. […] But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from
somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put
in a glass cabinet. (Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 46)
The perfect symbol of the trinket only receives sarcasm and a description of undeniable stylistic
poverty. Secondly, it is clear that the narrator takes great care with the form of his text, that he
overloads his writing with signs of literariness, that he offers a real mix of pastiches of all kinds,
and that he never leaves any room for the truly tragic.
If there is a kitsch effect in J.’s writing, then the question remains: where does the humour
begin and end? Are we supposed to laugh at J.'s lyrical flights of fancy, or at his ponderous
moral lessons? Yet another episode can provide a key to our interpretation: a scene in which the
characters laugh wrongly when they hear a German singer performing a Lied (Jerome, 2008
[1889], p. 64). The situation is as follows: the members of the audience all want to be seen as
cultured people who understand German, but two pranksters have led them to believe that they
are about to hear a comic song. So, eager to prove their mastery of German language and culture
– and to show that they are not fooled by appearances and that they are therefore part of the elite
capable of detecting the second degree –, they deliberately misinterpret every sign, assigning it
the opposite meaning of the one they would have intuitively given it. They insist on seeing
classic comedic tropes in the song’s most lugubrious accents, or laughing when they feel like
crying. The episode thus invites suspicion, but a suspicion that is multiplied, and we don't know
whether or not we are right to feel it because, in the continuity of the strategy of blurring that
we have already mentioned, this would not be the first time that the work has contradicted itself.
The narrator himself keeps saying the opposite of what he has just affirmed.
The ambiguity of the text therefore stems mainly from the fact that we are faced with a
combination of humour and an unreliable narrator. This is a particularly effective strategy
employed by Jerome. Laughing at bad taste is a way of implying that you have taste yourself.
But Jerome, who is self-taught, sees his legitimacy as an author constantly being called into
question (Oulton, 2017). His choice of a silly narrator, in a gesture of self-mockery, is a way of
showing his modesty and countering such attacks. Deliberate bad taste could also be part of the
strategy. Thanks to J., Jerome seems to be in a permanent state of quotation, which allows him
to avoid taking responsibility for the content of his novel. It is as if he had made the famous
disclaimer his own: "The views and opinions expressed are those of etc....". Here, however,
responsibility is further diluted by the fact that the narrator himself could, in the end, be self-
deprecating, showing deliberate bad taste in order to make readers smile. The quotation,
multiplied, draws attention to the creative process, highlights the inauthentic nature of the
representation and thus reinstates a subversive dimension in the work. This is what distinguishes
“quotational kitsch” (Bancaud, 2017, p. 84) from genuine kitsch (Greenberg, 1939).
5. Conclusion
There is a scene in which the characters, after eating, reinterpret the apologue of the limbs and
the stomach in their own way: happy and satiated, they come to the conclusion that it is enough
to eat well to be “a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father – a noble, pious man”
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(Jerome, 2008 [1889], p. 80). The scene obviously suggests that this is a misinterpretation of the
story taken from Aesop (sixth century BC) and later retold by Shakespeare in Coriolanus, a play
in which the apologue becomes particularly ambiguous. It might be tempting to see this as
another possible echo of the entire work. We, the readers, could be going the wrong way when
we try to make sense of all these trivial scenes of swallowing, which may well be nothing more
than crude comedy. Is it right to see deliberate bad taste as proof of good taste, or displayed
good taste as proof of bad taste? When are we wrong? Soon we could be reduced to not knowing
what to think of the text, of its didacticism, its lyricism, its humour – obliged to be humble in
our role as readers. We are proving thus that we are the fools of this story, which somehow lies
heavily on our stomachs. Perhaps this is the ultimate trap of Jerome's novel: blurring our
bearings to the point where we no longer dare trust our own sense of taste.
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