Like I said above, I think what I'm trying to do is build an anonymous object, set its name attribute, and then use the name attribute to call methods on it.

It seems to me that you are jumping through more hoops than you should have to... If you are going to do it like this, then I guess what you need is class variable, a hash, that holds the names of your nodes as keys and the node objects corresponding with those names as the values. Then you would need to provide a function that would dispatch a method call based on the node name (and for that, you'd need a dispatch table of some sort.)

package Node;
my %METHODS = (
    somemethod => \&Node::somemethod, 
);
  
my %NODE; 

sub new { 
    my $class = shift;
    my $name = shift; 
    my $self = { NAME => $name }; 
    bless $self, $class; 
    $NODE{ $name } = $self; 
    return $self;
}

sub dispatch { 
    my $method = shift; 
    my $name   = shift; 
    $METHODS{ $method }->( $NODE{ $name }, @_ ); 
}

sub somemethod { 
    my $self = shift; 
    # ...
}
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I'll repeat myself though... I doubt this is the best way to go about solving your problem. You might want to reconsider your design some.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";