“Isolation and Illusion: A Symbolist Fantasy”

“Isolation and Illusion” is one of many texts collected in an anthology of P. Craig Russell’s work, titled Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories 1977-1997. Although wordless for the duration of the story, it bears an epigraph attributed to Rosetti,"Beauty without the beloved is like a sword through the heart," which appears at both the beginning and end. Although the attribution is specious, the expression lends perspective to the multi-layered tale of loss, solitude, fear, hope, and death. The action follows an angelic figure rendered in the style of Michelangelo in uninked pencils as he travels from atop a tower in a dead city to the hinterlands, where he is caught in a nightmarish trap of thorny vines, from which he is freed by doves, allowing him to continue on to find a half-submerged cathedral, where he encounters his beloved. All this is an illusion, though, as he has been impaled through the heart by a malevolent bramble while in the trap. Russell weaves an extended visual metaphor for loss and its potential aftermath, from the immediate devastation at the point of impact to loneliness, the sudden unexpected aftershocks of pain, through false hope and into terminal despair. “Isolation and Illusion” could be paired with Ambrose Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” for an intertextual comparison of their plots.

“Isolation and Illusion: A Symbolist Fantasy” by P. Craig Russell
High School
Dark Horse Comics
14pp.
Published 1981
ISBN 1-56971-838-5
$14.95

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