Pharmakon by Teju Cole

Pharmakon

By Teju Cole

Mack, 2024

“Duty to warn.” It’s a legal principle, most commonly used in the therapeutic situation. The therapist has the duty to abandon confidentiality and to warn authorities if patients may do harm to themselves or others. I’m moving “duty to warn” into the reviewing situation. Six months ago in these pages, I offered a very positive review of Teju Cole’s novel Tremor, a work I compared to modernist masterpieces by Woolf and Joyce.

Now Cole has published Pharmakon, a book that includes 104 photographs and twelve mostly one-page pieces of presumably fictional prose. Having published a hybrid book of photos and fiction, I was pleased to receive Pharmakon as a gift. Much as I hate to disappoint the giver, I believe it’s my duty to warn those who may have read my review of Tremor: Pharmakon is very different in substance and quality, not just from Tremor but from Cole’s earlier hybrid work, Blind Spot. In fact, I found Pharmakon so disappointing that I wonder if Cole has succumbed to pretentious self-indulgence, to a belief that his success allows him to publish anything he wants to offer.

So caveat emptor, but I want to be fair to Pharmakon, particularly for the fans of Cole and of photobooks. If Tremor is an accessible modernist novel, Pharmakon is like—and may even have been influenced by – Eliot’s difficult modernist poem “The Waste Land.” It is a collection of diverse but mostly desperate voices, unhappy with personal lives. Almost all of the multiple narrators of Cole’s fictions are in desperate political situations, victims of tyranny and violence scattering them across a land laid waste. Tremor is a diaspora fiction focused on a Nigerian named Tunde teaching at Harvard. Pharmakon has nameless exiles and refugees in nameless places. Unfortunately, their stories are so contextless and brief that they elicit little emotional response. In one long chapter in Tremor, Cole threw the voices of numerous Lagos natives talking about the challenges of that city. The speakers were given two or three dense pages. In Pharmakon, only one narrator gets more than one page.

Last year, Cole published a long essay in the New York Times Magazine about ancient and contemporary tragedy—would-be refugees who died in a forest fire in northern Greece. The victims had identities and histories, as did the Greeks who found them and tried to notify their families. It was a very powerful piece, with Cole’s artful photos complementing his prose. Though probably well-intended in its political sympathies, Pharmakon lacks anything like the effect of Cole’s essay. Many of the photographs in the book are extreme close-ups, but the whole—the images and the voices—seems recorded with a telephoto lens, detached from the author and, ultimately, the reader and viewer.

In Pharmakon, photographs occupy about 90 percent of Cole’s pages. In his Blind Spot, photographs and texts are about equal in number and in artistic quality. A huge majority of the photographs in Pharmakon are uninteresting as individual works of art. I think Cole might even agree with that judgment. The photographs exist to perform a collective documentary function. Many of the scenes in Eliot’s poem are rocky, sterile, without water. The same is true of Cole’s photos: close shots of stones and stains, pocked columns and decaying walls. Most of the water is seawater seen from a ferry. Almost all the photos, like those in Blind Spot, are in color, but they are under-saturated and over-exposed, as if they had been taken through a fuzzing filter and were themselves wasting away.

Like Eliot, Cole favors scenes of ruins, not panoramic shots of cities or mid-range shots of buildings and monuments but extreme close-ups or severely cropped images, small fragments given whole oversized pages. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” says a voice, maybe Tiresias, in “The Waste Land.” No shoring for Cole: the fragments are the ruins, but they are often, at best, opaque in purpose. In the essay by Cole mentioned above, he says he was in Greece for the first time. Some of the photographs in Pharmakon appear to have been taken in Greece, not just because of the stones and walls but also because of white light washing out the images as in Tod Papageorge’s photobook On the Acropolis. Unfortunately, even Cole’s documentation of Greek ruin is often banal in its selection of subjects and excessive in its repetitiveness. In an earlier photobook about Switzerland entitled Fernweh, Cole succeeded by presenting anti-postcards. Too many of the photos in Pharmakon are anti-art, almost random snapshots as if the photographer, as well as the land, were wasted.

Pharmakon in Greek meant both poison and cure. Most of Cole’s photographs and stories are the poison. Near the beginning and again near the end some greenery suggests life, but no humans are present in the photographs. Plenty of evidence of humans’ absence but not presence. As for cure—or, at least, hope—one of the last sections of photographs has more vivid color and is not as bleak in its subjects as the rest of the collection, but any hope for return of the displaced is very faint. Three of the last four images are photographs of a blank sky, as if only heaven could offer relief from worldly waste, a notion implied by Eliot.

Probably understanding that many of the individual photographs lack aesthetic merit, Cole has said in an interview that the sequencing of the photographs in Pharmakon is crucial (though he doesn’t reveal how that sequencing works). Eliot said of Henry James that he “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” I assume the sequencing of Pharmakon was created by a fine mind with many ideas, but I believe only other photographers, professors (like Cole), and photography professionals will take the time to penetrate and appreciate the subtle sequencing. For other readers, even readers of Cole’s novels, there are just too few rewards photo to photo, page to page.

In its resistance to all but a few readers, Pharmakon resembles self-published photobooks that some photographers pay $35,000 to get into print. Only on the last page does one learn Pharmakon was released by Mack, an eminent publisher of high-art photobooks. And yet Pharmakon reminds me of many vanity press photobooks, for like authors who cannot find commercial publishers Cole chooses to present photographs and texts that are forbiddingly private and militantly gnomic. My impression of Cole’s selection process was confirmed when I listened to him talk about Fernweh and realized just how intuitive, associative, and both allusive and elusive Cole’s shooting and sequencing mind was.

Years after the publication of “The Waste Land,” Eliot called it “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” I don’t believe Pharmakon is merely “grumbling,” but it makes few attempts to solicit viewers and readers into what Cole has elsewhere called the “insistent minimalism” of its world. The book’s intention may be political, but its execution is obscurantist. Famous as a novelist and photo critic, Cole didn’t have to pay big money to see Pharmakon between its elegant soft covers. Although no price appears anywhere on the book, and although it was a gift to me, I’m pretty sure you would have to shell out some first-world dough to own Pharmakon—the last, or maybe the first, reason I thought I had the duty to warn.

Tom LeClair’s most recent novel, Passing Through, is a hybrid memoir, novel, and photobook.