Franco Moretti · 2011 · PDF · Calibre ID 5420
Resurfaced in The Pattern Determines the Parts (2026-10-25).
Role in the triad
Experiment: turns Hamlet into a network and removes vertices; position, not essence, makes Horatio indispensable.
Why this book
Applies the relational premise to a canonical play and tests it by deletion: Hamlet removed splits the network; Claudius removed changes little (clustering); Hamlet + Horatio removed severs Ghost and Fortinbras. Also the conflict pole: works by hand, admits lacking the mathematics.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “A network is made of vertices and edges; a plot, of characters and actions: characters will be the vertices of the network, interactions the edges” (p. 3)
- “two characters are linked if some words have passed between them: an interaction, is a speech act.” (p. 3)
- “Anyway. Four hours of action, that become this. Time turned into space” (p. 3)
- “what is truly deadly, is the characters’ position in the network, chained to the warring poles of king and prince. Outside of that red region, no one dies in Hamlet. The tragedy, is all there.” (p. 4)
- “Not for what is “in” it; not for its essence, but for its function in the stability of the network.” (p. 5)
- “Horatio has a function in the play, but not a motivation.” (p. 7)
- “The theory proper requires a level of mathematical intelligence which I unfortunately lack” (p. 2)
Themes
average distance · centrality · character network · clustering · distant reading · Hamlet · Horatio · power law · region of death · removal experiment · time into space · weak tie