Slicing the Baloney with Style

Cartoonist Claire Bretecher carves up poseurs and hypocrites

A young mother is fondly diapering her infant. The doorbell rings, and an old friend drops in, burbling with enthusiasm about her new job. "I'm off to the airport to pick up the ambassador from Bojo ... and then I have to cram myself into a press conference... and then I have to drag the ambassador's idiotic wife over to Yves Saint Laurent... but a girl's gotta eat. By the way, I'm off to Iran next week, so if you want a carpet just let me know ... And what about you? You've really decided not to go back to work? Well, everybody's gotta do their own thing ... ciao!" and she's gone. Shaken, the mother walks into the kitchen and drops her baby in the trash can.

So goes another episode of Les Frustres, a cartoon strip created by a Frenchwoman named Claire Bretecher and appearing in the leftist French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. For four years now, Les Frustres has been comic-stripping the hypocrisy from everyday life among the thinking classes. In the process, Bretecher has become a financially secure woman, a cult figure among the trendy Parisians she skewers, and probably the most important French cartoonist never to be heard of in the U.S.

That last characteristic will be shortlived. Ms. magazine has begun featuring a Bretecher cartoon each month on its back page, and others have been popping up in such disparate places as Esquire and Viva. A book-length collection of her work, National Lampoon Presents Claire Bretecher ($5.95), was published in the U.S. last month by 21st Century Communications. Ten volumes of her work have appeared in France, and recent ones have sold more than 100,000 copies each. To Roland Barthes, a leading French writer-philosopher, Bretecher is "the best French sociologist." Nouvel Observateur Editor Jean Daniel calls her "the servant of Moliere." Bretecher would answer such praise with her favorite epithet, "bidon" baloney).

Readers who try to decipher her fullpage, many-framed scratchings may think she has a point there. Bretecher's comic strips, not exactly thigh-slappers, suggest the wry, nervous humor of Jules Feiffer and Garry Trudeau. Her typically flabby, potato-nosed men, women and children often discourse eloquently on feminism, Freudianism, environmentalism, Marxism or some other millstone of doctrine, only to betray their soaring words with some bourgeois inconsistency. There is, for example, the porn-film producer who denounces his working class audience as "pigs" and says he panders to them only to help finance the kind of film he pines to make, a "political" film. Or the theater critic who guffaws his way lustily through ten frames and then, leaving the play, hotly denounces it as "terrible! No sense of subtlety! No social awareness!" Says Bretecher, who claims no passionate political proclivities of her own: "We live in a world of obligatory liberalism and self-gratifying guilt."

Bretecher has endured that world for 38 years. Raised in Brittany, she reports that she drew her first cartoon at age five and went on to too many years of art school. After teaching drawing in Paris, she began selling freelance cartoons to comic-strip magazines. Among those early Bretechers were Turnips in the Cosmos, a sci-fi epic, and Cellulite, the saga of a husband-hunting medieval princess. Publisher Claude Perdriel was impressed by some of her more satirical strips, and in 1974 offered her the newly vacant job of regular cartoonist at his Nouvel Observateur. "I submitted my work on the condition that they did not require me to hang around for a lot of conferences and that they did not censor me," Bretecher recalls. To test Perdriel's sincerity, she drew as her first effort a saucy strip of a mother exposing her backside to her child. "It was scandalous," she says. It was published untouched, as were all subsequent Bretecher strips. The publisher has also met her other condition. Declares Bretecher: "In all this time, I have never spent more than five minutes at the office."

She draws Les Frustres at home, a sixth-floor Montmartre walkup she shares with her photographer husband (they have no children). Bretecher usually cannot face her drawing board and swivel-top piano stool until the day the strip is due. As comely as her characters are homely, she patronizes the same voguish boutiques and is occasionally oppressed by the same fashionable insecurities as those she parodies. Except one. "The seriousness and dogmatism of the feminist movement have become appalling," says Bretecher. The dogma that appalled her most when she began to sour on the movement was a preoccupation with rape. Says she: "Those feminists are doing everything they can to make other women feel guilty, exactly as the bourgeois mothers of the 19th century did to their daughters."

Bretecher gets so worked up about the subject that on one occasion last year she came in days ahead of her deadline with eight consecutive strips featuring two rape victims who become famous on the talk-show circuit. That, ironically, is where Bretecher was last week -the American, not the French -making press appearances in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote her book. That task must trouble the satirist without an ideology. "Comic strips are a form of con," she confesses. "All you do is play along with something that works, and suddenly people are asking for your opinions on everything. It's all baloney." Could be, but she does slice it with undeniable flair. qed

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