Paul Valéry, the first social network analyst?

While it appears to be relatively common for social scientists to reconstruct social networks of characters within literary works (see for example the network study of the characters in Dante's inferno by Amedeo Cappelli and colleagues or the social graph of the characters in the Marvel comics universe), or to analyse the real-world social networks of authors (see for example Adam Obeng's work on William Godwin's acquaintance networks), to my knowledge, little attention has been given to explicit or implicit occurences of social network analysis within the substance of world literature itself. I just stumbled upon this interesting section in the French essayist Paul Valéry's 1896 La soirée avec M. Teste that describes the narrator's thoughts upon observing a theater audience (which evidently stands for society in general):

Chacun était à sa place, libre d’un petit mouvement. Je goûtais le système de classification, la simplicité presque théorique de l’assemblée, l’ordre social. J’avais la sensation délicieuse que tout ce qui respirait dans ce cube, allait suivre ses lois, flamber de rires par grands cercles, s’émouvoir par plaques, ressentir par masses des choses intimes, - uniques, - des remuements secrets, s’élever à l’inavouable! J’errais sur ces étages d’hommes, de ligne en ligne, par orbites, avec la fantaisie de joindre idéalement entre eux, tous ceux ayant la même maladie, ou la même théorie, ou le même vice...

This paragraph made me wonder whether Paul Valéry must be considered the first social network analyst. Isn't connecting people who have something in common via ideal lines while leaving those who have nothing in common disconnected exactly what network analysts do today? After all, network studies in epidemiology connect people suffering from the same maladie, studies of co-citation networks allow for following the bonds between people with the same théorie, and network analyses of mafia clans describe connections between those who have fallen for the same vice. Thus, in a way, Valery described as a fantaisie in 1896 what network analysts would actually do in the future, decades before Jacob L. Moreno's 1930s invention of sociometry and even longer before John A. Barnes' first mentioning of the term "social network" in 1954.

On a sidenote, Paul Valéry started writing La soirée avec M. Teste in 1895 in the same house (No. 9, Rue de la Vieille-Intendance in Montpellier) in which Auguste Comte, one of the founding fathers of sociology, was born a century earlier, in 1798. What a small world.