Triad 32 of 32 · 2026-10-25 · Difficulty 3 · Shared form or method, Same subject, Conflict
The thread
Three books that take the relation, not the thing, as what carries meaning, and test the claim by removing a piece. Perec’s Preamble: ‘the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts’. Life A User’s Manual walks a building’s cross-section one room per chapter (99 chapters for 100 squares; knight’s tour unstated in the text) and ends with Bartlebooth dead, holding a W-shaped piece over an X-shaped hole. Moretti turns Hamlet into a network (characters = vertices, speech acts = edges) and deletes vertices: removing Hamlet then Horatio — flat, unmotivated, less central than Claudius — severs the Ghost and Fortinbras from the play. Hage & Harary supply the formal vocabulary (cutpoint, bridge, hamiltonian, eulerian) and find it already in anthropology: New Hebrides sand drawings, one continuous line, finger never lifted, nothing traced twice, are eulerian. Conflict over mathematics: Moretti ‘unfortunately lack[s]’ it and works by hand; H&H: ‘the mathematics really must be made explicit’; Perec makes it explicit and hides it.
The three books
- Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec, David Bellos (translator); 1978 (trans. 1987; Vintage ebook). Anchor: the graph narrated from inside — a building walked one room per chapter; the Preamble states the relational premise.
- Network Theory, Plot Analysis (Literary Lab Pamphlet 2), Franco Moretti; 2011. Experiment: turns Hamlet into a network and removes vertices; position, not essence, makes Horatio indispensable.
- Structural Models in Anthropology, Per Hage, Frank Harary; 1983 (Calibre lists 1984; 2007 reissue). Formal ground: exact definitions (cutpoint, bridge, hamiltonian, eulerian) and the claim that graph theory is already in anthropology.
Notebook
- The W in the X-shaped hole: Perec ch. 99 vs Moretti p. 7 (‘a function in the play, but not a motivation’) — write the page where a piece exists but has nowhere to go; node or remainder?
- Write under Deacon’s rule (H&H p. 10: one line, ends where it began, nothing traced twice); then, using the chapter-path diagram (Stairs visited 12 times), name your own stairwell — the figure you must keep passing through.
- Choose an edge rule for your commonplace book or the Lexicon (Moretti p. 3: ‘an interaction, is a speech act’); remove your most central entry; find your Horatio. Cf. Perec Preamble: ‘the ability to link this piece to other pieces’.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Moretti, Network Theory, Plot Analysis (Lit Lab Pamphlet 2) — https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf
- Newman, The Structure and Function of Complex Networks (2003) — https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0303516
- Paoletti, Leonard Euler’s Solution to the Königsberg Bridge Problem (MAA Convergence) — https://old.maa.org/node/116597
- Da Silva, An Ancient Art Form Topples Assumptions about Mathematics (Scientific American) — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-ancient-art-form-topples-assumptions-about-mathematics
- UNESCO, Vanuatu sand drawings — https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/vanuatu-sand-drawings-00073
- Life: A User’s Manual (Wikipedia, structure: knight’s tour, bi-squares) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life:_A_User%27s_Manual
To carry
“in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.” — Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual, Preamble (trans. David Bellos)
Themes
Bartlebooth · bridge · centrality · clustering · cross-section · cutpoint · Deacon · distant reading · edge · Euler · eulerian circuit · Gestalt · graph theory · Hage · hamiltonian path · Hamlet · Harary · Horatio · jigsaw puzzle · knight’s tour · Königsberg bridges · model · Moretti · network · New Hebrides · Oulipo · Peirce · Perec · power law · relation over element · removal experiment · sand drawings · structuralism · structure · time turned into space · Valène · Vanuatu · vertex · weak tie
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