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weren’t getting along at the time. None of it was to be taken literally.” This
response would lead readers to believe that this is part of the “irony” and
“parody” of his lyrical content, and indeed there seems some honest and obvious
sincerity in this explanation. Then, he pauses briefly following the above
comment to add, “Although at the time, I wanted to fucking do it.” To Eminem,
both statements would seem to be true, it was all a put on, but it was also an alltoo-real desire. Slim Shady allows him to play Clyde through Slim in the song,
but Slim is not a dispassionate and separate self through which Marshall’s
feelings can be examined. Slim and Marshall both parody and fantasize Kim’s
death, leaving the self that Eminem represents as the narrator of the song a
fractured and contradictory one. That self is not objective, but, in the postmodern
sense of the self demonstrated by Borges, it is a more authentic one, containing all
of the fragmented and contradictory output and appearance of the self as all
authentically “true.”
Thus, the self that Eminem simulates is an authentic version of the
postmodern constructed personality. Slim Shady is artificial, but so too are many
of our personas. Sociology has long understood the artificial nature of human
personality and the need for personas. Consider Erving Goffman’s definition in
The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life (1959) of the “fronts” that we use to
define ourselves to others. These social masks are not merely those used by
professional performers but ones that we all use in performing ourselves. He says
that the front is “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly
functions in general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those that observe
the performance” (22). Fronts serve through our appearance and manner both “to
tell us of the performer’s social status” as well as to “warn us of the interaction
role the performer will be expected to play in the oncoming situation.” What
becomes complicated in examining Eminem and his comments about himself, and
himself in the manner that are his music and his personas, is that even he seems to
need to be informed by the cues of his own manner to be warned about the role he
is to play within the context of his songs. Often, again, he seems to play multiple
roles that complicate how he and we interpret who he is in the song as well as
who his personas are.
Up until now, I have only briefly spelled out how this kind of persona
generation-through-metanarrative is related to Baudrillard’s notion of simulation.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillaid uses an example from painting—
neofiguration— F