In order to get an idea of what Nietzsche thought about his own style, I.Dj. suggested I look for "Stil" in an index of N's correspondence. Since I am digital-oriented and lazy and lying in bed, I decided to do a keyboard search of "Stil" in the Letters at eKGWB by pressing Command + F (world's best search tool, apparently). It wasn't the easiest task: the letters are divided by year, and there is no index with keywords. So I searched through every year. I started with 1884, and it was not long before the search tool showed me a very lucid letter by Nietzsche, on Nietzsche, to his friend Edwin Rohde, written just after the publication of Zarathustra. In the same clear language, obviously still on the same high that took him over with Zarathustra, he writes:
Mein Stil ist ein Tanz; ein Spiel der Symmetrien aller Art und ein Überspringen und Verspotten dieser Symmetrien. Das geht bis in die Wahl der Vokale. —
(My style is a dance; a play of symmetries of all kind and a jumping over and mocking of these symmetries. That goes up into the choice of vowels. —)
Clearly this is a good image. A gem, really, for the kind of work I am trying to do. I transcribed the letter into Word document (simply copy-pasting gave me a 100 page document), added some comments and put it aside in a folder "1884" (within "Stil" within "Nietzsche" within "Gesamtkunswerk").
But as I continued searching, clicking through various words that begin with "stil-", I was struck by the amount of "still", "stillte" in this full text. This reminds me of a note cited by Mieke Bal and that other guy in the paper on SEMIOTICS, written by Nietzsche as well, "chronological reversal." "Suppose one feels a pain. This causes one to look for a cause and spying, perhaps, a pin, one links and reverses the perceptual or phenomenal order, pain... pin, to produce a causal sequence, pin...pain." I was looking for a comment on style, and I found silence where I was not looking.
