Yes, this is a book
about chickens. David Barringer, author of short stories, magazine
articles and a book about design, created a picaresque novel that
is a part Animal Farm, a part love story, a little bit
memoir of self-discovery and many parts post-modern wit. Johnny
and Ruth fall in love in the brutal circumstances of an industrial
poultry farm populated by feuding hens and philosophizing roosters.
Johnny Red tells the story of their escape and subsequent
futile journey towards happiness and freedom.
The writing is eloquent and sharp, a pleasure to read. The book
is humorous, but it doesn’t mock; the chickens are familiar
but they aren’t cliched characters. Rather amazingly—bafflingly,
really—Barringer has created a believable world where life’s
big questions are asked and answered by poultry. Poultry with rich
inner lives and a drive to find fulfillment. The book is not cute,
it’s not forced, it’s not boring and it’s no one-trick
pullet.
See for yourself by reading the excerpt that follows this e-mail
Q&A with the author.
Ann Arbor Paper: Where did the idea for Johnny Red
come from?
David Barringer: From an ad parody. I was helping
a friend make a magazine as a gift for his girlfriend, and we used
ad parodies as filler. I made up an ad hyping a prison memoir written
by an inmate of the Sweetachewa County Poultry Farm, published by
Fowl Publishers of Chicken, Alaska. For some odd reason, the idea
of writing a prison memoir from the point of view of a rooster stuck
with me, and I wrote just to get the ideas out of my head.
A2P; Why animal characters? And why chickens?
DB: While the idea came from that ad parody, I didn’t have
to stick with it. I could’ve switched to dogs in a pound,
fish in an aquarium, animals in a zoo. This is the stuff of animated
film. (In fact, after I wrote the first draft and started sending
it to agents, the movie Chicken Run came out; now that
my novel is published, the movie Chicken Little is about
to come out.) I had a hard time justifying my decision to stick
with chickens, but I was tempted by the freedom to imagine an entire
fictional world, to create it and its inhabitants without worrying
about any future reader saying, “People don’t live like
that. People don’t talk like that.” Writing about talking
roosters also has a long literary history. When I discovered that
Chaucer wrote about the rooster Chauntecleer and his hen Pertelote
in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” I thought,
“Ah, hell.” And so I kept digging and found roosters
everywhere in literature and religion: ancient Egypt and Rome, in
Celtic legend and the Gnostic texts, the Bible and the Koran, Confucius,
Rabelais, Cervantes, on and on. It seemed I wasn’t crazy.
I was part of a lineage. This eased my self-doubt.
A2P: How did you research the book? Did you have
prior knowledge of chickens?
DB: I had no prior knowledge, and I refused to
do any research until I felt that I really needed it to continue
imagining the world. I wrote first and hit the books later. But
then I really hit the books. I learned about breeds and the history
of domestication, the evolution of factory farming, the subcultures
of poultry shows and cockfighting, diet and anatomy. I read everything
I could to gather literary and religious references to roosters
and chickens, everything from Babylonian religion to Ezra Pound’s
“Cantos.” I used the facts to my own ends in building
up this world, but most of the literary and religious references
I removed or buried.
A2P: Did you also research hen and rooster behavior
and social interactions?
DB: I used research like a kid uses snow to build
a fort. A little of this and a little of that, some ice and sticks,
pack it down. But I meant to write a novel about characters, not
a guide to poultry, and so while I describe the breeds accurately
and the conditions of factory farming accurately, I regarded the
facts as starting points. The characters move through this world
and respond to it like people do, that is, ambivalently. Some characters
follow the rules, some break the rules, and others make their own
rules.
A2P: And what was your intent in depicting the
farm specifically in the book?
DB: The big poultry farm in which the characters
are imprisoned in the first part of the book functions as the setting
for survival, for how various characters act and react to that crazy
place. Oppressing circumstances are the basis of many novels and
movies (the hero forever resisting prisons, gulags, fascist governments,
police states, etc.), and I was conscious of that. But I wanted
to make sure that the farm wasn’t a caricature, something
that restricted absolutely all freedom of movement and thought.
Characters still make choices, and, most importantly, Johnny Red
(the rooster) and Ruth (the hen) court and fall in love. But I felt
they also had to escape so that they could make choices in relative
freedom, out from under the shadow of the big bad prison.
A2P: “A carefully researched allegorical
novel with chickens as characters” sounds, to put it lightly,
risky. Did you have doubts along the way?
DB: I still have doubts, but the doubts have to
do with the success of the book and not with its content. I was
obsessed with writing the book (I think a novelist must have to
be obsessed or else you’d just give up at page thirty-seven),
and so I wrote it for myself or, rather, for the ideal reader. But
when you’re writing about a rooster, you can’t help
but wonder how people are going to respond to it. I couldn’t
help imagining all the bad puns book reviewers might make someday.
So I wrote my own bad reviews (“A First Novel for the Birds,”
“Pluck Off,” “Word Droppings,” “To
Crow in Vane,” “Some Like Me Hot,” etc.). By anticipating
these bad reviews, I hoped to exorcise the demons. I considered
including them as a preface, but I eliminated all post-modern hijinks
from the book.
A2P: Did you intend Johnny Red to be read
as an allegory?
DB: By definition, a story with animal characters
is an allegory, but my novel is not an allegory in the sense that
characters represent moods or philosophies or even human types.
One character is not “Love,” another “Pragmatism,”
and a third “Mick Jagger.” That kind of thing is pretty
awful. No, I was only able to write this book by persuading myself
to regard every character as a full, unknowable mystery. This enabled
me to write like crazy about each character because I didn’t
assume I knew them completely and could sum them up in a paragraph
or two. I wrote to discover who they were, over and over again,
trying to define them and allowing each character to define themselves.
Often, this means a character says one thing and does another, admits
to one belief but never acts according to it. I regarded my characters,
in other words, as people. Holding myself in this tense limbo between
the animal world and the human world was a big part of the fun of
writing this book.
A2P: Were the rooster characters inspired by anyone
in particular?
DB: The greatest danger for anyone writing a rooster
novel is that it’s so easy to slip into autobiography. I put
a lot of myself in the book, even paralleling certain events in
my life. While I was writing the book, I’d scribble overheard
conversations into my notebooks and then use them for various characters.
I definitely harvested the attitudes, arguments and beliefs of friends
and family and even other writers and philosophers to create these
characters. But I lived with these characters for so long that,
now, they are who they are.
A2P: The novel is a picaresque. How did you structure it?
DB: The structure evolved over the duration of
the writing. I had many ideas for novels before this one, but every
time I outlined their structures, I killed them. I lost interest.
I need the mystery to keep writing. Early on I knew this book was
going to be a serial adventure. Each chapter would consist of a
well-defined event or conflict. This kept the book alive for me.
I’d just read Don Quixote, and that picaresque structure suited
me well for this book. But I also depended on an overall sense,
a kind of philosophical intuition, that this was a story of liberation.
This is how Ralph Williams, the University of Michigan professor,
describes the Bible. I took his class as an undergrad, and my understanding
of the bible comes in large part from his class. So while structuring
my novel, I kept in mind two books: the Bible and Don Quixote.
A2P: Rather impressively, what would seem to be
a clever gimmick for a short story turns out to be a compelling
idea that drives a novel. How did you stick with the idea
so long, and how did you keep it interesting?
DB: It’s an interesting question because,
if I’m able to come up with an answer, that means I should
be able to recreate it, that is, to write another novel. And the
fact is I really haven’t. I’ve written another book
of linked short stories inspired by my family life, but I’ve
never been able to get my head into another novel the way I did
with this one. The process of getting into a novel is painful. I
needed an hour or two every day just to recreate the world in my
head and sustain it so that I could get back to writing the next
part. In retrospect, I can say that I felt very powerful having
created this world nearly from scratch, and while it was painful
getting back into that world every morning for three years, I was
addicted to staying inside it-and manipulating it-once I was there.
A2P: How would you describe the styles at work
in Johnny Red? The writing brings to mind Animal Farm,
Candide, Ivan Denisovich, and various memoirs.
What is your strategy?
DB: I decided early on that I was not going to
write down to these characters. If they were going to speak, they
were going to speak well. I thought it was funny that chickens were
not only thinking and speaking, they were thinking like philosophers
and speaking like wise asses. Once I freed myself from adhering
to any sort of fictional “realism” (after all, nothing
is “real” about talking animals), then I had another
decision to make, which was how much self-consciousness to give
the characters. I gave them a lot. But I didn’t give them
information about the human world they lived in. They were ignorant,
for the most part, of that, which echoes our ignorance of the natural
universe we live in. I liked that struggle of always working things
out. The various styles, then, arise as a result of these judgments
about character. The characters are self-consciously working things
out, and so I could, too. Why not evolve the style over time? Why
not switch from first-person to third-person and back again? I didn’t
do it gratuitously. For example, I break down the structure of the
book in a chapter in which Johnny and Ruth are also, in a sense,
breaking down, and as they restructure their relationship and place
in the world, so too the narrative language gets reordered, not
quite back to normal, but back to something else more orderly. My
strategy with style was, essentially, not to lock myself in but
to let style follow and emphasize some of the content, some of the
movement of the characters as they struggled to live.
A2P: There is an emphasis on storytelling throughout
the book; how stories are told, by whom and to what effect, is a
reoccurring topic of discussion among the characters. Why?
DB: I was self-conscious about storytelling because
the animal characters made me conscious of the story I was telling.
So I had animals tell stories. In the second chapter of the book,
in fact, a sarcastic rooster named Pill tells a story about living
life as a potato. This thinly parallels what I was doing in the
novel. But more importantly, I thought that these characters would
be using stories to explain a world they didn’t understand.
I did not give my characters religion or law or even art, which
is what humans use to make sense of the world and order their relationships.
Without those, these characters resorted to stories. And Johnny,
as the main character, develops his skills as a storyteller over
the course of the book. He starts out a lousy storyteller, an imitator,
becomes a liar, and eventually, by telling stories, becomes more
himself.
A2P: The idea of “home” is ambivalent
in the book -- an impossible ideal for some characters, a trap for
others. Why?
DB: Because the characters are always moving from
one circumstance to the next, from small farm to big farm, from
life in the woods to life on the road, they are always thinking
about how to live and where to live. Home is something they typically
have no control over, and once they do have a measure of control
(in the “wild,” which is still defined by people with
their reservoirs, highways and power lines), they realize that they
have no idea how to live. What do they want? What ways of living
are good? These are questions people struggle with all the time.
I struggle with them today. Should I live in the city, a small town,
the suburb? What’s good or bad about all this? What decisions
have I made, and what decisions have I let be made for me? I very
much steered clear of utopianism and dystopianism. I wanted to focus
on particular characters and how they got through these questions,
sometimes answering them, mostly not, pretty much like most people.
A2P: Can you talk a bit about the humor in the book?
DB: The kind of humor you will not find in this
book is the bad-pun kind, the Disney kind, the obvious jokes about
animals acting like people. I wrote a lot of that just to get it
out my system, just to delete it. I became very conscious of how
often we use metaphors, analogies and euphemisms that are based
on the animal world. I had to be very careful not to have animal
characters say things that reference the human point of view. I
instead went back and reordered their language to reference their
point of view. That was tough, but it did provide for some humor.
Beyond that, I used slapstick, name-calling, understatement, malapropism,
surprise, hyperbole. The book had to be funny or it just wasn’t
going to do justice to this fictional world. It would’ve been
too flat, too close to a kind of righteousness better suited to
an animal-rights polemic. This is a novel about particular lives,
and in my view, humor always plays a role, even-or especially-gallows
humor.
A2P: Later in the book, you switch perspectives. You leave
the main first-person narrator and you have other animals provide
oral histories of the main characters. Why?
DB: Several reasons. First is the humor of it.
Not only are animals talking, but they’re giving oral histories.
Second is the temptation of it. I’d been writing from the
point of view of chickens for a while, and I couldn’t resist
giving over some of the narrative to other animals (a Doberman,
squirrel, mouse, cat, hawk, spider, etc.). Third is the more serious
reason, and it is structural and thematic. Johnny and Ruth at this
late stage in the book are moving from a haggard on-the-road way
of life and looking to transition to another. As they move through
this transition, other animals observe them and describe their encounters
with them. This allowed me to discuss how these particular new animals
had accommodated themselves, and it allowed me to provide new perspectives
on the meaning of Johnny and Ruth. The arrival of Johnny and Ruth
in their meadow by the stream (and under the power lines) is described
by a fellow resident, a muskrat, and his story of their lives there
allowed me to be more objective about Johnny and Ruth as well as
to move faster through a time that, relative to the other parts
of the book, is rather peaceful.
A2P: At the end of everything that happens to them,
Johnny and Ruth seem to reach some kind of bohemian spiritual ideal,
freed from conventions through suffering and experience, only to
finish unsatisfied. What’s the moral of the story?
DB: I made sure that the place they’d found
to establish a measure of peace was not ideal. They have a hard
time building a home. They suffer personal losses. They’re
isolated from the other inhabitants, not outcasts but definitely
oddballs. They’ve made a grand journey and become heroic in
their own ways, but they can’t escape the effects of the past.
There is no moral about life, only an acknowledgment of life. Even
the adventures of true love have to end.
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