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Norwegian author's fat comment hits Canadians' self-esteem

Photo: Thinkstock

You’ve probably never heard of Karl Ove Knausgaard, unless you happened on the flap he caused in the last few days by trashing the eating habits of Newfoundlanders in a New York Times Magazine article.

Knausgaard is a Norwegian author best known for a six-part, 3,500-page memoir entitled Min Kamp (My Struggle), which should not be connected in any way with an identically titled book by a certain political leader in Germany in the 1920s.

Social media is still rippling with reaction to Knausgaard’s observation that almost everyone he encountered in a restaurant in St. Anthony, N.L., during a trip to visit abandoned Viking settlements at L’Anse aux Meadows was fat, and apparently proud of it.

“Everyone in the place, except the waiter, was fat, some of them so fat that I kept having to look at them,” Knausgaard said, recalling his dinner at a place called Jungle Jim’s.

“I had never seen people that fat before. The strange thing was that none of them looked as if they were trying to hide their enormous girth; quite the opposite, several people were wearing tight T-shirts with their big bellies sticking out proudly.”

The comment, initially reported by the National Post, predictably caused a Twitter storm that took two basic tacks: how dare he, and jeez, maybe the guy has a point. That’s typically Canadian, isn’t it? Torches and pitchforks accompanied by a little introspection.

Newfoundland and Labrador have the highest rates of obesity in the country, according to Statistics Canada. Chris Mitchelmore, a member of the province’s house of assembly, tweeted that he hoped it would get people talking about the problem.

Others, though, saw Knausgaard as a rude foreigner who repaid Newfoundland’s famed hospitality with unkindness.

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“Travel writer couldn’t take L’anse aux meadows in winter. Don’t worry buddy. Know who else couldn’t? The Vikings!” Mark Critch snarked on Twitter.

“Newfoundland is home to the warmest people, the greatest food, and so much love,” said someone with the Twitter handle @BreBleats. “It’s a shame Karl Ove Knausgaard didn’t talk about that.”

Knausgaard not very interested in people he meets

Indeed, Knausgaard’s entire NYT Magazine piece, Part 1 of a saga chronicling his travels through North America, has a kind of passive-aggressive vibe. As Katy Waldman writes in Slate, he finds much of what he encounters in places like Detroit as strange. He makes little effort to engage with the people he meets. He seems unable to climb out of his own head.

But the fact the stereotypically bleak musings of an obscure Scandinavian writer about Newfoundlanders’ eating habits were greeted with a mix of anger and shame may reveal more about Canadians’ self-image than we care to admit.

Canadians have a very specific picture of themselves that we expect foreigners to accept – modest, enlightened, progressive, quietly competent, fit even.

“I think that when foreigners perceive us in a way that goes against our flattering stereotypes about ourselves, that can be very disconcerting,” says J.J. McCullough, a Vancouver-based former commentator with the Huffington Post and defunct Sun News. “It’s sort of going off the script.”

Unflattering observations, however objective, are likely to be met with a harsh reaction, he told Yahoo Canada News.

“As Canadians, we’re kind of told that the world loves us very uncritically. When somebody says a critical thing about Canadians, then it’s kind of like ‘What! This is not what I was promised,’ and people get offended as a result.”

McCullough’s web site J.J.’s Complete Guide to Canada, features a page on Canadians’ self image, including a table showing how the myth can clash with outside perceptions. For instance, are Canadians polite and respectful or simply passive and boring?

Part of the problem is rooted in the longstanding national identity crisis as Canada’s colonial ties to the British Empire frayed and the country drew more closely into the American orbit. The concept of a Canadian inferiority complex, especially in relation to the United States, has been a talking point for decades.

Definition of a Canadian: Not an American

Historically, the reflexive definition of what is a Canadian often has been reduced to not being an American.

And that is where Knausgaard may have committed a greater sin than remarking on Newfoundlanders’ girth, McCullough suggested. He lumped us in with the Americans.

“When you read the full piece by the author, it’s actually quite striking how he in his mind doesn’t really distinguish Canada and America,” said McCullough. “He sort of thinks of it as a common cultural space and there’s times when he uses Canada and America somewhat interchangeably in his own mind.

“That is like the ultimate insult to a Canadian, isn’t it? A lack of appreciation of the tiny little distinguishing characteristics and traits that we imagine to in fact be these huge broad, polarizing divergences.”

Given that a lot of Canadians think their American neighbours are overfed, making the same observation about Atlantic Canadians probably got us right in our national identity. We just can’t see American flaws as our flaws, McCullough explained.

“When a foreigner observes that this is not in fact reality, that Canadians are just as fat, it sort of troubles us in a weird way because that’s not what we’re told about ourselves,” he said.

“Somebody should not be observing such a thing because it’s wrong. It’s not only that it’s cruel or mean-spirited but it’s objectively not correct because that is not the story that we tell ourselves.”

Ask a Canadian about typical national foods and you get things like poutine and butter tarts, not burgers and fries, which are seen as definitively American, though neither are exactly slimming.

“Canadians just have to learn to learn to be honest with themselves and have to understand themselves as people that are largely culturally indistinguishable from the United States,” said McCullough.

“That is a complicated revelation to make. Canadian nationalism, to some extent the entire Canadian project, is based on denying that reality.”