Attempt At Criticizing the "Attempt At Self-Criticism"

Writing sixteen years after the publication of Birth of Tragedy, it is unclear why Nietzsche employs the term "attempt" to criticize his youthful style. He is relentless in his criticism, calling BT "an impossible book -- badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy." But he also calls it "a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places. [...] This was the voice -- they said suspiciously -- of something like a mystical and almost maenadic soul, stammering laboriously and at random in foreign tongue, almost unsure whether it wished to communicate or conceal." Almost lamenting this faux pas, this crucial step he overlooked, he exclaims that "it should have been singing, this new soul, not speaking! What a shame that I dared not say what I had to say then as a poet: I might have been able to do it! Or at least as a philologist: -- even today almost everything in this field still remains undiscovered and unexcavated by philologists!"

Where exclamation seems to be the right expression to describe much of what is going on in his "Attempt at Self-Criticism", declamation is perhaps the accurate term that would more broadly describe this later style. The attempt is an interior monologue that resembles more closely the soliloquies of Hamlet (or Iago), than an analytic philosopher's. It is as though the text is meant to be read out loud, like Genealogy, even gesturally, for the point to be made. This undoubtedly recalls his familiarity with theories of Latin rhetoric on ELOCUTIO (style - I owe this to Bégot). Rather than simply writing, Nietzsche seems to be speaking to his text, blowing into it, through style; the spirit that would make it come to life.  

"So what is Dionysiac?" he asks in the next section. "This book contains an answer -- 'one who knows' is speaking, the initiate and discipline of his god. Perhaps I would now be more discreet, less eloquent, in discussing such a difficult psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks." Presenting discretion reminds me of a citation from Zarathustra:

Die stillsten Worte sind es, welche den Sturm bringen. Gedanken, die mit Taubenfüßen kommen, lenken die Welt.

It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps direct the world.

Nietzsche himself is on a stage. In seven parts written at Sils-Maria, August 1886.