Competition and Cooperation in Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home

Abstract

This paper studies competition and cooperation in A Long Way from Home within transmodernity, the emerging socio-cultural paradigm. It argues that, despite the heavy focus on competition favoured by the car rally the protagonists enter, the novel encourages cooperation. This ties in with the recovery by transmodern scholar Irena Ateljevic of Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, which seminally put forward the “partnership” and “domination” models structuring human evolution. The analysis backs Eisler and Ateljevic’s claim that contemporary times, in the midst of unprecedented turbulence, are progressively veering towards a partnership system based on caring behaviours, empathy and cooperation. Two salient traits of transmodernity are studied: attention to the commonalities of existence and the turn to pre-modern forms of knowledge. In this light, the novel succeeds in avoiding postmodern competing identitarianism while it escapes modernity’s universalising tendencies in revaluing Indigenous lore.