Interpretation and absent texts

Raymond Tallis ( Not Saussure ) is no friend of post-structuralism, but he recognizes that absent texts shape the reading of present ones:

“What seems to be offered to us when we confront a particular work is at least partly determined by the silent presence of other works belonging to the genre to which we assign the one we are actually reading. The wrong ‘mental generic set’ will prevent us from being able to assimilate or even make sense of it. Anyone who reads, say, Philosophical Investigations under the impression that it is a detective story or The Red and the Black in the hope of learning the rules of snooker will simply read past what is essential in these works and find them incomprehensible. Likewise, it is the ‘generic mental set’ of the reader that makes, say, William Carlos Williams’s jottings count as more than banal diary entries unaccountably chopped until into lengths. The verse-like form of his fragments means that they can command, or commandeer, a readerly attention, an intensity of noticing, that they would not otherwise receive and certainly do not warrant.”