Yet psychoanalysis also comes in for Musil’s contempt, its self-confirming theses being just the latest set of cultural clothes with which to dress up the naked void Musil believed lay at the heart of human experience.

Despite his cosmic apprehensions, Ulrich becomes enmeshed in the efforts of the aristocratic-bourgeois echelons of Vienna—renamed “Kakania”—to devise an anniversary celebration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire adequate to rival the Prussian celebrations scheduled for the following year. The yearning to locate a sense of higher purpose for a lapsed and mongrel empire for which no such thing is possible is expressed in bureaucratic horseshit: pompous speeches, the filing of endless reports. These efforts are transacted in the upper-class salon hosted by Ulrich’s cousin, Frau Tuzzi, or “Diotima”, a woman whose charisma and pretensions both perplex and arouse Ulrich. This satirical milieu—named “The Parallel Campaign”—hangs under a Sword of Damocles: the horrors of the First World War would soon demolish every pretension and platitude. The Campaign itself becomes a medium in which realpolitik militarism and self-righteous nationalist paranoia advance their nightmare agendas, pushing the country toward war.

But this morbid historical satire is only one of several kinds of fictional plot which interpenetrate the essayistic fugues of Ulrich’s solitary, flâneur-like existence. Ulrich’s triangular involvement with his childhood friend Walter and the troubled, yearning Clarisse could make the whole subject of a more conventional European novel, in the mode of the early Hermann Hesse, or like Henri-Pierre Roché’s Jules et Jim. Elsewhere, Ulrich’s flirtatious involvement with the half-Jewish daughter of a mixed family, one whose other courtier is a proto-Nazi ethnic nationalist, evokes Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, mixed with portions of Isherwood’s I Am A Camera. Then there’s the notorious proletarian sex-murderer, Moosbrugger, subject of fascination for Ulrich and Clarisse and several other characters. This provides the book with a regular does of Gothic relief; the chapters from Moosbrugger’s point of view are among the most poetic evocations of insanity I know. Ulrich’s projections onto Moosbrugger forecast Nazi horrors, but also explore the possibility that the way to a transcendent state may lie in criminality, putting us simultaneously in the territory both Fritz Lang’s M and Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’. Musil is, needless to say, dialectical by nature.

Still unmentioned is one of the book’s great characters: Paul Arnheim, the Jewish-Prussian industrialist-scion, famous middlebrow author and bon vivant, and Ulrich’s bête noir in the scenes at Diotima’s salon. Arnheim’s place in European society suggests a combination of the most fatuous aspects of Steve Jobs, say, married to those of Malcolm Gladwell. For several hundred pages in the middle of the second section Arnheim may seem capable of doing the impossible: stealing Ulrich’s show. Subject of Musil’s most caustic irony, Arnheim is also a model of how Musil uncannily transcends and writes through his contempt. Time and again a character seems to have been slayed upon their first appearance, only to live in subsequent chapters, to be deepened and enriched into sympathy under Musil’s scrutiny.

Partly this is the effect of Ulrich’s radioactive thought experiments. He seems to infect other characters with his own existential condition: that of valuing most the part of ourselves that makes contact with the abyss between collective presumptions and our intuitions of something else, lurking disastrously close by: “The horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, that is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul.” This is a typical exhibition of Musil’s genius for spatial metaphors. Whether through architecture or cosmology, on city streets or at sea, the reader is put in a physical relationship to Musil’s ultimate subject: our immanent and incommensurable knowledge of eternity.

Not last, not least, despite her disorienting late arrival, is Agathe, Ulrich’s “forgotten” sister, with whom he is reunited by the death of their father. Agathe is a figure of radical destabilization both to Ulrich and to the reader’s grasp of Musil’s intentions; she seems to topple the book. She’s at once feminine and manly, innocent and criminally impulsive, anti-intellectual and yet Ulrich’s match in a world that has provided him with no adequate mirror. Agathe tempts Ulrich, at last, into some version of the criminality he fantasizes as a route to transformative ethics. Yet once tempted he lingers, agonizingly, on the threshold. She arouses him, but in part to a passivity that seems to dissolve his masculinity. As a character in her own right, Agathe provides a late dose of Musil’s brutally clear-eyed feminism; she’s a version of George Gissing’s “Odd Woman”, who understands that no one knows what to do with her.

Musil employs any number of Modernist literary techniques—stream of consciousness, interior monologue, multiple subjectivities, and non-linear time—and yet never makes an absolute formal commitment to one or another of these techniques in the manner we associate with Joyce or Woolf or Faulkner. His methods both exceed our expectations of Modernism and fall short; it contains, as if exhumed from the stomach of some mythological creature, half-digested forms: bildungsroman, historical epic and stage farce. With its profusion of unforgettable characters (I’ve neglected Soliman and Rachel, Count Leinsdorf, General Stumm, many others), and Musil’s Proustian command of slow-unfolding “mise-en-scene” (Ulrich and Diotima in her maid’s closet; the public riot against the Parallel Campaign; Clarisse’s spying on the exhibitionist in the park), The Man Without Qualities is anything but the world’s longest essay. The book is full of sex, though barely anyone has any: Arnheim wants Diotima, Clarisse wants Ulrich, and so on—everyone glances, no one leaps. Musil’s teasing goes beyond cliffhanger, into a philosophy. As Ulrich declares to Diotima, “We wildly overestimate the present.”

The performance is like that vaudeville act in which a performer gets hundreds of plates up on broomsticks, then darts from one to the other to keep them spinning. Bob Dylan said, “The purpose of art is to stop time”; Musil’s purposes may seem to be those of someone who wants to dwell forever in the world he’s bound to destroy, as if his novel was a heroic device for preventing World War One’s arrival. Like the spinning plates, it presents a stasis which vibrates, and transfixes us with an implicit forestalled disaster.