Let me now quote a historical, or pseudo-historical, narrative of a very different kind. It purports to describe an engagement between an American and a Russian warship off the coast of California: “What happened on the 9th March, 1864 … is not too clear. Popov the Russian admiral did send out a ship, either the corvette “Bogatir” or the clipper “Gaidamek,” to see what it could see. Off the coast of either what is now Carmel-by-the-Sea, or what is now Pismo Beach, around noon or possibly toward dusk, the two ships sighted each other. One of them may have fired; if it did then the other responded; but both were out of range so neither showed a scar afterward to prove anything.” This passage describes an historical event which is held to have occurred, to have left no trace, and to be susceptible of honest report only in the most uncertain and indeterminate manner. It admirably represents a modern skepticism concerning the reference of texts to events. Events exist only as texts, already to that extent interpreted, and if we were able to discard the interpretative material and be as honest as historians, quite honestly, pretend to be, all we should have left would be some such nonsignificant dubiety as this account of the first engagement ever to take place between American and Russian forces. The book contains characters who attach importance to that encounter: members of a crackpot political party, and users of a communication system which bears no significant messages, and is in illegal opposition to the United States Post Office, which at least professes to do so. Their view of history exists only by the fiat of an absurd ideology. And as we read on the question arises, whether we do not live in a complex of semiotic systems which are either empty or are operated on the gratuitous assumption that a direct relation exists between a sign and a corresponding object “in reality.” The only sense attributable to the naval engagement arises from the operation of coded fantasies in a lunatic group. And the impotence of that group, as we see from its account of the seafight, is such that their pseudo-history cannot supplant the official histories, which serve a different and much more successful ideology.
The story of the sea battle occurs not in the work of a professed historian, not even as a nightmare example in a book by some distracted philosopher of history, but in a novel called The Crying of Lot 49. It is, for all that, a serious historiographical exercise. It illustrates the point that we are capable of a skepticism very remote from the pleromatic certitudes of the evangelists, remote even from the sober historicism of only yesterday. We can, indeed, no longer assume that we have the capacity to make value-free statements about history, or suppose that there is some special dispensation whereby the signs that constitute an historical text have reference to events in the world. That it would not be possible to discover a passage like the one I have just quoted in a genuine historical work is an indication that we mostly go about our business as if the contrary of what we profess to believe were the truth; somehow from somewhere, a privilege, an authority, descends upon our researches; and as long as we do things as they have generally been done — as long, that is, as the institution which guarantees our studies upholds the fictions that give them value — we shall continue to write historical narrative as if it were an altogether different matter from making fictions or, a fortiori, from telling lies.
– The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1980), pp. 107-9