On The Hero Mimesis In Joseph Conrad’s "The Lagoon"

Joseph Conrad’s “The Lagoon” contains confusing cross-cultural hero mimesis which complicate his multiple “mimetic” characterizations.In recomposing Geoffrey Chaucer’s“Knight’s Tale”,the knight Arcite’s blind pursuit of chivalry ideal is altered as the Malay Arsat’s failed Western hero mimesis.While critics have conducted influence studies and postcolonial critiques on “The Lagoon”,Arsat’s hero mimesis is not yet identified,let alone the postcolonial significance of the Conradian hero mimesis.Duplicity is deeply embedded in Arsat’s hero mimesis.Undertaken from textual,intertextual and contextual levels,the exploration of his hero mimesis penetrates progressively into the evidences,source and significance of the Conradian duplicitous hero mimesis.The primary textual analysis takes Arsat’s imitation of Caesar’s victory report— “I hear,I see,I wait”—as the point of departure for critique.The affirmative heroic declarations,stated twice to a white man both in the frame narrative and the framed narrative,are interpreted as incongruous with his behaviors.His actual condition of “can’t hear,can’t see,and can’t wait”displays the duplicitous form of his hero mimesis.The secondary intertextual critique constructs a theoretical revelation of the source of the duplicity in light of Conrad’s interpersonal alterations of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”.Based on acquisitive mimesis which is quite different from the traditional representational mimesis,Rene Girard’s mimetic theory attributes the effects of mimetic desire to interpersonal distance,and reveals the white man and Arsat’s brother as the external and internal mediators of Arsat’s mimetic desire,resulting respectively in his mimesis and betrayal.The self-absorbed desire to possess,mediated by the white model,underlies Arsat’s duplicitous mimesis and contrasts with the self-decentered concern of his brother.The final postcolonial critique foregrounds the authorial mimetic characterizations and the colonial social context in enlisting Lord Jim as a complement.The ambiguously heroic identity of the imperial subject Jim counteracts the critical difficulty originated from Arsat’s identity as a racial Other,and highlights the diagnosis of duplicity in Conradian hero mimesis.Owing to the conflicts between personal desires and social codes,the character doubles in “The Lagoon”(Arsat & his brother),“Knight’s Tale”(Arcite & Palamon)and Lord Jim(Jim & Brown)relativize the once unified chivalric/heroic ideal and demonstrate duplicitous ideal mimesis.Alongside the contextual shift from the declining feudalism to the rising colonialism,the preservation of violence embodied in the chivalric ideal relativized as violence(Arcite)and exploitation(Brown)problematizes the cultural dislocation in hero mimesis,and the cultural enlightenment alleged by European imperial subjects.The selfdecentering concerns of Jim and Arsat’s brother,in turn,echoes to the Girardian positive mimetic desire which stresses that “we desire for the other what the other desires for her or himself”,and unveils Conrad’s hope of breaking the Self/Other dichotomy and building crosscultural conversation and understanding.