Zachary Garrett ruminates on Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s comic book Dog Days, a rare example of autofiction used in this form. His writing weaves in personal experiences, explores similar work both in comics and other formats, inevitably discusses dog farming and consumption in South Korea, as well as animal commodification in general.
Though these stories are arranged in chronological order, and though the individual tragedies that befall each of her family members and friends are each compelling and upsetting in their own way, they all feature little mediation that might bind them together thematically or into some larger narrative. Similarly, while there is some degree of escalation and successive revelations in Dog Days, there is minimal build of character or plot across its chapters, producing a feeling that each slight story is its own island. A dog appears and then it’s gone, and the nearby chestnut tree isn’t going to fill us in on what happened.
There’s a sincerity to Gendry-Kim’s work that also positions it as part of autofiction’s response to postmodernism. Little levity or playfulness alleviate the misery. Her dogs’ food-based names seem like darkly ironic choices until you learn that they’re just real names. Autofiction’s advocates argue that the kinds of societal traumas that Gendry-Kim’s work addresses, like the atrocities of Japanese imperialism, and present-day emergencies, like the resurgence of fascism and accelerating climate change, demand not grand fictional narratives employing pastiche and parody but, instead, real witnesses.