Integrité

Roberta Kwan 65 and Graham Ogden (22) argue that Qoheleth infuses yitron with a metaphysical sense and is asking: ―What reward [or gain] is there on the balance sheet of life for ... all the effort and hard work that human beings put into the business of living?‖ (Provan 54). Qoheleth answers his own question in 2:11: ―Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour to do: and, behold, all was vanity [hebel] and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.‖ Within humanity‘s terrestrial bounds there is no gain; human attempts to achieve it by controlling reality are futile. The hopelessness of attaining yitron evokes gain‘s implied binary opposite—loss. Qoheleth imbues his discourse with a consciousness that life under the sun involves loss. Loss is one of the ―times‖ in the ―Time‖ poem (Eccles. 3:6), and is poignantly educed in 12:1-7 where the end of life is likened to valuable objects rendered useless: a silver cord, a golden bowl, a pitcher at a fountain or a wheel at the cistern that have all been snapped, broken or crushed.

Loss is a key motif within Cloudstreet. At the novel‘s chronological commencement, Rose is rapidly acquainted with the ―really bad‖ thing she knew to be imminent—on that very day, her father Sam, the perennially-poor family‘s sole breadwinner, loses the fingers on his right hand, his working hand. Sam attributes this loss to forces beyond his control, which, in his naming of them, can be seen as whimsically irreverent parodies of the biblical God. The idea of God ―with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning‖ (Jas. 1:17) and under the shadow of whose wings one can find protection (for example, Ps. 17:8, 36:7, 63:7) has been reconstructed in the Australian vernacular into the dubious, unpredictable ―shifty shadow of God‖ (9). Further, the biblical image of the providential hand of God (for example, Deut. 7:18-19; Josh. 4:24; 2 Chron. 30:12; Ezra 7:6, 9; Eccles. 2:24, 9:1) becomes the comically grotesque ―Hairy Hand of God‖ (161). Sam equates the shifty shadow and hairy hand with luck and fate, and he usually finds himself on the wrong side of both. Sam ―was on a lifelong losing streak‖ (12).

The language and image of the ―loser,‖ often used in connection with Sam, can be inverted and idealized in the imagination of a nation that at times has mythologized loss, a prime example being the ANZAC 11 loss at Gallipoli in World War I, which forms part of the backdrop of Cloudstreet. Such mythologizing occurs towards the end of the novel: A long time ago [Sam]‘d decided this was to be a straight up and down life of bad luck.… If anything, he figured there was some strength in knowing the way things were—it gave a bloke security, something to believe in…. Everybody loved a loser, especially a loser of such romantic proportions. (342) Here, Sam‘s enduring ―loser‖ status characterizes him as a happy-go-lucky, benignly fatalistic larrikin. But there is a darker side, which reveals the flimsiness of Sam‘s God-parodying fatalism when it exposes him to despair. Upon being shamed by the adultery of his wife, Dolly, so that, from his perspective, his sons