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?