MODERNISM, REGIONALISM AND PLACE OF SOCCER IN JOSÉ LINS DO REGO’S FICTION

A READING OF ÁGUA-MÃE

Abstract

The article inscribes the theme of football within the broader history of Brazilian modernism, focusing on the trajectory of regionalist writer, José Lins do Rego, in 1940s Rio de Janeiro, when he established himself as a novelist and, in parallel, invested in newspaper collaborations through a series of sports chronicles. The framing proposed here focuses on a lesser-known novel by the author, Água-mãe, and sustains that the national-popular imagination around the practice of soccer in the country gives rise to its insertion in Brazilian fiction. At the same time, this novelistic inscription allows for the fictional renewal and the reworking of the writer’s own image, hitherto marked by the Northeastern landscape, seeking to refute a portion of the literary criticism that limited him to the monothematic of the memorialism of his native region. At the end of the description and of the analysis of the book, this article concludes with the argument that José Lins do Rego’s advance into a fictional narrative around the urban and countryside scenes of Rio de Janeiro – with the use of contemporary and everyday themes of the time, such as soccer – shows his contribution to the general objectives of the modernist ideal, which had been developed and metamorphosed throughout the first half of the 20^th century within different artistic-literary groups, currents, and conceptions.