Playing poker at an all-women’s smoker

When this large unfinished canvas first came to public attention in the 1920s, it bore the title La Toilette de la Mariee, Dressing the Bride. Later studies, based on documents and on the painting itself, have persuasively demonstrated that the scene is not one of preparation for a marriage but for a wake. Crucial to this radical change in interpretation was the radiographic examination of the central figure, the young woman seated in the chair being tended by her companions. This revealed a nude figure, both arms hanging down, her head leaning against her left shoulder. The awkwardness of the overpainting makes it highly probable that this change was made not by the artist but by another hand at a later date, to permit the painting to be given a more cheerful theme for the sake of the market.

— gustave-courbet.com, "Dressing the Dead Girl"

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.