When the Elephants Dance

The stories in the novel are about grand love and powerful passions; heroism and epic actions; showdowns with wizards, monsters, and ghosts; and families in conflict that must find their way to reconciliation. The stories reflect the Filipino culture and are a critical element in the novel’s celebration of that culture. The storyteller designs each imbedded story to help someone in the cellar better understand and cope with their grim reality. These stories (which take up more than half of the war narrative) are parables, didactic tales intended to teach and in turn to clarify the world into tidy lessons.

Holthe, however, offers a less therapeutic conception of the power of storytelling. As she acknowledges in the Author’s Note, Holthe grew up listening to the stories her parents and grandparents told about their homeland, culture, and the experiences of the war. Thus, storytelling here has a power of its own to transport listeners into a world of the imagination, to allow a person to enter into an entirely created immersive environment that is, under the spellbinding power of the storyteller, as real as the world of real-time. This use of the symbolic assessment of storytelling inevitably recalls The Decameron, a 14th-century classic by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in which Florentine aristocrats seek the refuge of a country estate just outside the city to avoid the bubonic plague. There, night after night, they entertain each other with elaborate stories that not only pass the time but provide the consolation of a powerful (albeit temporary) respite from unpleasant reality. 

Since the early decades of the 20th century, the genre of magic realism has evolved into a major expression of the contemporary literary imagination. In works of magic realism, dreamlike moments intermingle with narrative events that are otherwise realistic. Often, these magical elements are introduced into a world that is grim—a world of poverty or a world torn by war. Thus, the traditional fixed line between reality and fantasy blurs. Because the iconic works of magic realism have come from the literatures of South and Central America, the Pacific Rim, and Africa (the most notable exception is the work of American Toni Morrison), these magical elements often reflect indigenous folktales, fables, and myths, which makes magic realism an element of celebrating and defining these cultures otherwise marginalized during centuries of Western imperialism.

Holthe draws on all of these elements. The stories related by the refugees in the cellar draw on exotic figures from Filipino legends and myths, unfamiliar only to Western readers. The stories center on witches, vampires, sea monsters, magic potions, ghosts, and several grand-scale events: a massive eclipse, an earthquake that sinks an entire church, and a vast migration of flying fish. The presence of these strange elements in these stories is unquestioned, accepted by those who listen to the stories in the cellar as real and introduced without context or larger frame to somehow qualify their evident fantasy.

What distinguishes Holthe’s use of magic realism, however, is how she maintains the traditional boundary between the real and the fabulous. In iconic works of magic realism from the mid-20th century, the real world, whatever its degree of horror or oppression, is transformed into the fabulous. In When the Elephants Dance, the magical and fantastic elements are parts of stories told within the claustrophobic confines of the cellar; they never fuse with the war narrative. That real-time world is too forbidding, too terrifying, and finally too oppressive to be mitigated by the magical conjuring of the imagination. It is only in the last part that the novel shakes free of the alternative reality of magic realism. No stories are told; the characters, now freed from war, discover a reality of community and compassion that does not require magic. That new reality is magic enough. 

War fiction traditionally juxtaposes images of conflict and peace. In that regard, When the Elephants Dance is perhaps less an example of war fiction and more an example of prison fiction. Holthe’s novel, both the narrative present that recounts the last days of the Japanese occupation of Manila and the stories that enchant those in the cellar, juxtaposes a variety of settings that suggest imprisonment and moves only in the closing pages into a sweeping vista, Ana’s home, with its sweeping view of the mountains.

Holthe suggests that for a civilian people caught up in the chaos and brutality of war, literally all around them it is freedom from that metaphoric prison that in the end begins the process of emotional recovery. Added to that imprisonment is Holthe’s broader narrative of the Filipino culture symbolically enslaved for centuries by a succession of colonial governments that compelled the Filipino people to ignore and, worse, lose touch with their cultural identity. In the last pages, the Filipino people are liberated by the Americans to become what they have dreamed of being for nearly 500 years: free.

Before the symbolic movement in the closing pages to freedom, the narrative offers a series of settings that are increasingly claustrophobic. These settings enclose the reader as well the characters. These are harsh places that restrict movement, prohibit social interaction, and limit mobility. It is a narrative world defined by barricades, locked doors, crowded rooms, narrowing alleys, and blackened windows. The most obvious is the Karangalan cellar with its perpetually locked narrow window and dirt floor where more than half the novel takes place. The basement is small: “It would fit six coffins” (23). Given the constant barrage of artillery and gunfire and given the risk of venturing out, the reader is locked inside the cramped dank room along with 15 others.

In addition to the tight confines of the basement, the reader is locked into other confining spaces: There are the numerous caravans of Filipino detainees, skeletal figures all bound together with ropes; there is the hotel supply room where Isabelle is gang-raped, a locked pseudo-room dark, airless, and guarded; there is the hastily constructed detainee encampment at Fort McKinley, itself surrounded by barbed wire, where Alejandro, himself tied with ropes, is tortured and where Domingo is shot; there is the mountain cave where the insurrectionists hunker; and there is the abandoned warehouse where the Filipinos are led in the last hours of the Japanese occupation. That is the novel’s most harrowing symbol of imprisonment. The door to the warehouse is barred, and the building itself set on fire. The liberation from the burning structure by the Americans provides the novel its closing affirmation of freedom. The transition to freedom is not easy; Alejandro admits, “For a long time, we stand in circles, unsure what to do” (363)—but that freedom promises their eventual recovery.