This chapter’s tests are biased towards the purposeful detail, and they would make a worse book if obeyed everywhere. A novel in which every object has a reason to be present is not a world but a set, and a reader feels it as airlessness long before she can say what is wrong. Barthes’s barometer has no job in the story of Félicité, and the room it hangs in is more convincing for that; Dickens’s portraits are inventories the count test would cut; the fog of Bleak House repeats itself without development; Robbe-Grillet refuses the senses this chapter recommends. Each would fail a test, and the failures are part of why they are read.
The tests therefore identify what a passage is doing, not whether it is good, and their proper output is a question. What survives the change of fashion is not the preference for the sparse, telling particular, which belongs to the last sixty years, but the fact underneath it, which held for Balzac’s inventories as much as for McGregor’s swallows: a page can carry only a few of the true things, and the reader will take the few that are there as the ones that matter. The writer’s choice is unavoidable. What the tests add is the knowledge of what was chosen, including the details chosen to do nothing, and the description of Sethe’s back is a reminder that some choices are answerable to more than the passage’s economy.
See also: the Reference coda, which develops the argument; The Transition (Chapter 5), the next chapter, on how one unit hands over to the next.