“Run Through the Jungle”

“Run Through the Jungle” is introduced through a Creedence Clearwater Revival lyric fragment placed immediately before a dream from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Its command to run and not look back lends the passage a language of flight, while the dream turns that flight into an image of intimate, joyful destruction.

The Epigraph and Its Dream

The excerpt gives the lyric in two successive lines, then identifies the song and performer before shifting into the first-person dream. In that dream, the narrator sees herself as a malicious, androgynous dwarf figure and Saul as her corresponding male-female counterpart. They dance beneath enormous white buildings filled with menacing black machinery, but their relation is not hostile: they are joined in spiteful malice and kiss in a terrible longing for death. The lyric’s warning against looking back thus precedes a vision in which destructive companionship is faced directly, even as the dreamer recognizes its horror.

Echoes in Haven’s History

The jungle refrain also finds a suggestive echo in the book’s account of the 1900 revival that helped give Haven its name. The fast-talking preacher Colson drew a growing congregation with promises of divine harvest and sanctuary, declaring that the town was a haven. His language made a place of worldly ambition sound sanctified, and talk of changing Ilium’s name began the following day. Colson later took the congregation’s money and exploited young women before fleeing in the night; the promised refuge was inseparable from the harm his revival concealed.

That history darkens the song’s image of flight. Colson literally folded his tent and left, while the town remained with the consequences: nine children born out of wedlock in the following months, and, after the name-change vote, Paul Clarendon’s killing of his infant son and wife before taking his own life. Set beside these events, the jungle’s imperative to run does not promise escape from what has happened. The adjacent dream, with its machinery and destructive intimacy, makes the lyric a compact threshold between flight and confrontation: the past may be left behind in words, but its violence persists in the places and relationships it has marked.

Narrative Function

The song is not described as a performed or remembered song within the dream; it is an epigraph, and its placement supplies a frame rather than a plot event. Its brief, insistent lines prepare the reader for a movement from apparent escape into a dreamscape where destruction is recognized but also embraced. The juxtaposition with the historical account of Colson’s revival further links the language of refuge and deliverance to the possibility of concealed damage: a promise to move forward cannot by itself undo what has been done.