Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 83

Losing Himself in the Music: Will the Real Marshall Mathers Please Stand Up? In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), T.S. Eliot suggests that the artist’s process requires “a continual surrender of himself. . . a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (148). Not unlike the notion of experiencing a poem as an objective correlative to the emotions presented through lyrics, seemingly his process of personal extinction lends itself to the high modernist desire to remain objective and distant from the text.1 The need for objectivity suggests a desire and a belief on the Modernist’s part that the self can be evaluated in a thorough and inbiased manner. Indeed, from Eliot’s own Prufrock to James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the modernists persisted in objectifying the self through third person personas, allowing these “selves” to be interrogated, satirized, and exploited at a distance from the artist and reader. In an artist like Eminem, though, postmodernism has found a different model of the self. Eminem, through his various lyrical personas, embraces the subjectivity of the age, blurring the line between authentic self and simulation. This essay will consider the metanarratives generated by Eminem through his self-referential lyrics and the difficulty in determining the difference between the narratorial and authorial voices within the simulations of himself that Eminem generates, including Slim Shady, Marshall Mathers; and more recently, through the main character of 8 Mile and one of the protagonists of the song “Lose Yourself’ (2002), Jimmy Smith Jr. (aka Rabbit). The self that is lost in this music becomes a kind of Baudrillardan simulation that is more important, perhaps, or (in Baudrillardan terms) a “more real” model of the identity of the postmodern artist. In order to make this identity clearer, though, I wish to return briefly to the contrasting example of the persona of the modernist artist to more clearly define this new postmodern artistic identity. In addition, this contrast will help to show how this persona has been reshaped in literature through similar kinds of metanarrative techniques used by Eminem. In essence, artists at the beginning of the century clung to the notion that the self could be examined in an objective manner because they believed that there was an essential self or a “true” self beneath the various personas worn in literature and culture. The burgeoning postmodern challenge against such essentialism began quite early. While Joyce and Eliot attempted to order the universe through essentialist mythologies, like many of the postmodernists that followed him, Jorges Luis Borges began to expose the subjective nature of the mythologies of history.2 If—as such texts seem to suggest—history is suspect because of its narrativity and hence its subjectivity, how could a narrative possibly convey an objective view of the self?