#georges perec

La Machine: Georges Perec / Eugen Helmlé, A project by Valentin Decoppet and Camille Bloomfield, Le nouvel Attila, Paris, 2025

When Funko revealed two of their VisionQuest figures the day after the presentation in Hall H, one of them turned out to feature something interesting.

Vision's suit resembles a set of tapes with code associated with graphs, and specifically mentions the Hamiltonian path.

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once.

Hamiltonian path is used to efficiently connect nodes in a network.

After his memories were restored at the end of WandaVision, Vision is now struggling to reconnect with those memories due to his lack of emotions.

On this page, we can find one of the types of Hamiltonian Path problems - Knight's tour.

A knight's tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square exactly once.

The most interesting find on the tour's page, however, is the mention of Georges Perec's book Life: A User's Manual.

The most notable example is the 10 × 10 knight's tour which sets the order of the chapters in Georges Perec's novel Life a User's Manual.

This marvellous book is one of the most ingenious works of modern fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of ever more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime... (Amazon)

Mekishana Pierre and Nick Romano at Entertainment Weekly noted the "trippy setting" of a mansion in Vision's mind where he sees personifications of other AI programs from the MCU, comparing this to the "reality-warping vibes" of WandaVision and Agatha All Along

The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on 23 June 1975, just before 8 pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth. Nonetheless, the constraint system creates hundreds of separate stories concerning the inhabitants of the block, past and present, and the other people in their lives. The story of Bartlebooth is the principal thread, but it interlinks with many others. Another key thread is the painter Serge Valène's final project. Bartlebooth hires him as a tutor before embarking on his tour of the world, and buys himself a flat in the same block where Valène lives. He is one of several painters who have lived in the block over the century. He plans to paint the entire apartment block, seen in elevation with the facade removed, showing all the occupants and the details of their lives: Valène, a character in the novel, seeks to create a representation of the novel as a painting.

11 rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant. The narrative moves like a knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to it). In each room we learn about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about someone they have come into contact with. Many of the characters at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, such as Smautf, Valène, Winckler, and Morellet, have a direct connection to Bartlebooth's quest. Thus, in those rooms the Bartlebooth puzzle-narrative tends to be carried further. Many of the narratives, however, are linked to Bartlebooth only by being related to the history of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier.