Irritation is the mother of invention, or at least it has been Claire Bretecher’s most potent muse.
In the more than a quarter of a century that Bretecher has been lampooning the cultural and sexual follies of France, pretty much everything has irritated her:
– Politics, though more often she finds politics simply boring.
– Feminists, though she’s a feminist.
– Leftists, though she made her reputation at Le Nouvel Observateur, a magazine that once was the Bible of the French left.
– Teenagers, even though, or perhaps because, she is the mother of one.
– And, of course, there are life’s truly irksome irritants, such as airport crowds, exercise and messy restaurant salads.
“Irritation,” she says, “revs me up.”
The brilliantly irritable Bretecher has been compared to Woody Allen and Jules Feiffer, to Nicole Hollander, Cathy Guisewite and Garry Trudeau, though in fact she is darker, raunchier and more absurd than any of her American analogues. She focused her lens on American life during a visit to Chicago, and the result appears on the following page.
In Bretecher’s cartoon cosmos, the human psyche exists in two dimensions: vanity and agony–and even vanity eventually dissolves into existential pain. Love is agony; sex is agony; adolescence is agony; motherhood is agony; eating, drinking and writing are agony; and agony is very funny.
One classic Bretecher slice of life:
A woman traipses toward a bed in which a man lies reading.
“I’m a mess,” she says. He tells her she’s mad.
“I’m repulsive and I know it,” she says.
“Cut it out,” he says.
She grabs one of her cellulite-pocked thighs. “And that–isn’t that repulsive?”
“It’s sweet,” he says with a suggestive pucker.
She jiggles her fat bottom. “Is that sweet? And that? And that?” He puckers up again. She continues her litany of self-loathing. He assures her she’s good enough for him.
“Oh, yeah, you,” she says, “but no real man would want me.”
He sinks darkly back into his book, leaving her to pout, “So I can’t even talk about myself without you getting into a sulk?”
Bretecher’s world is peopled by tendentious hippies who turn into pretentious yuppies, by feminists secretly obsessed with fat and fashion, by clergymen remarkable more for their debauchery than their piety. She once lit a national scandal by drawing a bishop in lipstick and fishnet stockings.
Open any selection from her five-album collection called “Les Frustres,” and you’ll encounter an entertaining array of frustration and discontent: Women lounge around on sofas smoking and talking about sex and cellulite. Pompous intellectuals lounge around in cafes, smoking and talking about sex and film. Blowhard men lounge around in bed smoking and talking about sex and themselves.
In what she calls her “hysterical” and deceptively simple line drawings, no one is pretty and everyone looks exhausted, including the 6-year-olds. It’s that universal weariness that makes her cartoons not simply cynical, but laughably sad.
Bretecher cultivated her unorthodox view of life in the most mundane of childhoods. Her official resume, quoted here, sums it up this way:
– Born in Nantes (France), to a strict Catholic family.
– Education in a religious boarding school (degenerated Ursulines).
– Art studies, unrewarding, unfinished.
– Various uncreative, nightmarish projects.
“I left my studies; it was the hippie times,” she said during her Chicago visit, smoking and sipping espresso in the dark lobby bar of the Hotel Nikko. “I have lost some years doing nothing, doing stupid things.”
She grew up drawing–“I had a pencil in my cradle”–and dreamed of becoming a painter.
But in the late 1960s, the magazines Spirou and Pilote began publishing her comic strips, and she realized comics were likelier than paintings to pay the high Parisian rents. In 1973 she sold her talent to Le Nouvel Observateur, then one of the country’s most influential magazines, and her weekly cartoons there made her both a national icon and a target.
“At the beginning, I couldn’t go out without being attacked by men,” she said, in a mix of French and French-inflected English. “At a party, there was always one guy saying something really awful.” She smiled. “Now I’m old; they feel much better.”
Green-eyed, ash blond, espresso-and-cigarette thin, she also happens, even at 56, to look like a runway model, which has confounded more than one outraged reader who thought that any woman who skewered men and women with such a pointed pen must have the body of a turnip and a face like a flat tire.
“At the beginning, everybody thought I must be very butch and ugly,” she said. “So they were very disappointed.”
Almost every week for most of a decade, she drew a cartoon of a dozen or so panels, cartoons that everybody who was anybody talked about and fumed about. Her drawings were, and remain, too radical and risque for mainstream American outlets: the naked woman notching her bedstead, men and women in anatomically explicit sexual positions, one woman groping another woman.
A decade of deadlines fed her creativity–“When I am free, I am lost”–but sapped her mental health. “I was crazy with stress.”
She took a year off and afterward resolved to work for the magazine only six months a year.
In the meantime, she wrote a comic book on in vitro fertilization. In the process, she realized she didn’t want to pass childless into what she calls “the third age.”
So she had a child with the man with whom she lives–“We don’t marry as much in France as you do here”–and her comic thoughts turned to children. She wound up inventing the foul-tempered teenager Agrippine, whose hugely popular comic book adventures introduced a new generation to her dark wit.
Bretecher is fed up with teenagers now, however, and is looking for a new topic, a quest complicated by a simple fact–her muse is no longer reliable.
“Getting older, I am less often irritated than I was before,” she said with a Gallic shrug, a puff of smoke and an unconvincing sigh.
