Johnny Red

A Hen and a Rooster
David Barringe'’s debut novel is about chickens who fall in love, escape imprisonment, and grapple with the deeper questions of our time.
by Laura J. Williams

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.

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.