Academic Bullshit

I frequently find myself sitting in class struggling to analyze and decipher a text in hopes to find the secret code and think to myself, "is there any way that the author meant exactly what he said?" If a writer had something to say wouldn't he just write it down? Is it possible that he just wrote the story purely to entertain his audience? Eubanks and Schaeffer's A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing was a reassurance to me-- thank goodness I am not the only person who thinks that scholarly writing is so often about how well you can turn what the author has written into something far-fetched.

I first had this thought in English class my freshman year of high school. We were reading The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway and my teacher explained to us how this novel symbolized Jesus Christ and his suffering on the cross. "Don't you see it," he said. "Santiago is a fisherman--just like Jesus was. His hands are torn up--just like Jesus' were when nails were hammered into as he hung from the cross" I remember thinking "You have to be kidding me. He is a fisherman (like so many other people) and of course his hands were torn up-- he is a fisherman!". Essentially, I was calling bullshit.

Why can't a story just be a story? A piece of writing meant to entertain, not something that a reader needs to swim through in order to reach the "true" meaning of the story. I mean isn't it possible that Hemingway just wanted to entertain an audience by telling a story about a fisherman's troubles? If I were I writer there wouldn't be a secret meaning.