Jean-Joseph Surin et « L’illettré éclairé » : une série littéraire (1968-1982)

De Certeau’s research on the « young man of the coach’s letter » by Surin, published in a 1968’s review, is the center of The Mystic Fable, released in 1982. The so-called « science of the texts » performed in 1968 as a history of religious ideas inside literary forms, turns around in 1982, and establishes literature as a theoritical model for mysticism. Literature then becomes the « historical novel » of mysticism. The Mystic Fable generates the specific venue for De Certeau’s writing, as a kind of genesis narrative, stretched between Surin’s family saga and the mystic word’s theory: the fable.