On the private and public sides to persona, art, and the confessional.
I’ve written multiple
posts arguing that
Sylvia Plath was more
than just the author of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” the autobiographical
poems for which she is best known, and I stand by those arguments. But the
truth, as I wrote in this
post on Plath’s and Mark Doty’s confessional poetry, is that even in those most
overtly autobiographical poems it’s very difficult to parse out the
relationship between text and identity, to say whether the speaker is Sylvia
Plath or “Sylvia Plath,” poet or persona, historical figure or literary
creation. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” Plath writes in “Lady Lazarus”—and
if so, can we say that her literary suicide is the equivalent of her actual
one? Where does the line between persona and person fall, and do texts like
these accentuate or blur it?
Such questions have only become more prevalent in our multi- and social
media saturated moment, where we hear about artists as much as we hear from
them (if not indeed far more), and no contemporary artist exemplifies the
ambiguities more than Eminem. Any artist who realizes three albums, in four
years, named after three different persona—The Slim Shady LP
(1999), The Marshall
Mathers LP (2000), and The Eminem Show
(2002)—is obviously well aware of, engaged with, and constantly pushing the
boundaries of identity and performance. And as a result, it is incredibly
difficult, both across the arc of his career to date and in any one song or
performance, to identify from which persona we’re hearing—much less whether we’re
getting a more genuine or more constructed or fictional perspective and voice.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My
Closet” (2002). The song’s verses seem to be among the most confessional of
his career, addressing his absentee father, his (allegedly) abusive mother, his
evolving relationships to them, his wife, and his young daughter, and many
other aspects of his life and identity. But since the song is included on The Eminem Show album, and since Eminem
explicitly concludes the second verse with the line “It’s my life, I’d to welcome
y’all to the Eminem Show,” it’s possible to read the verses’ extreme emotions
as exaggerated or constructed, part of the combative Eminem persona—a possibility
reinforced by the song’s chorus, in which the speaker (Eminem? Marshall?)
apologizes to the same mother whom he has so viciously attacked in the second
and third verses. In any case, Eminem, like Plath before him, proves that
confession is as an art like everything else—and one he does exceptionally
well.
Next ambiguous hit tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on this song, or other American hits?
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