16INTRODUCTIONhowever, to read the poem and its description of the jaguar as a reveal-
ing misreading of the animal. That the omniscient speaker interprets
the jaguar’s pacing as reflecting indifference or virtual escape rather than
stress and unhappiness (which is more plausible) suggests his belief in
the relative unconsciousness of the animal, the primacy of its instinct
over its immediate awareness of its surroundings.
Regardless of how one interprets the behavior of the jaguar, Costello
is right that the poem presents an encounter with an actual animal
rather than something obviously symbolic, conceptual, or otherwise
artificial, even if the poem is also attempting to capture something
seemingly essential about the species. Hughes’s poem makes us feel the
jaguar’s presence and its otherness, the reality of its energy, the power
of its pacing. We recognize that the jaguar is contained and partially
diminished by the artifice of the zoo, and also by that of the poem,
a meaning subtly echoed by and felt through the poem’s loose iambic
pentameter (a rhythm of natural energy and containment). The poem
approaches the animal and leaves a remainder, a mystery about the
animal rather than about the perceiver. The poem explicitly reveals
that part of our interest in large, sentient animals is a desire to engage
them, to have them present behavior that demands interpretation.
Again like the crowd in the poem, the reader is forced to recognize that
she wants to know what the jaguar is sensing. The poem offers itself
as a dramatization of such an interpretation. The poise and economy
of the poem, moreover, is at once a statement about the confidence and
fullness of the interpretation and that it is an act of the imagination, a
surmise, a creation.
Costello’s arguments about animal being and against philosophy
are consistent with Coetzee’s other writing, in which the distinctions
between human and nonhuman animals are frequently blurred. He
achieves this not by humanizing animals through careful depictions of
their behavior, or attempts to imagine their subjective existence, but
rather by de-idealizing human conceptions of our own nonanimality.
People, in Coetzee’s novels, are revealed to be a lot less conscious and
rational, and more driven by physical desires and needs, than they imag-
ine themselves to be.^34 So too Elizabeth Costello argues that reason is