Venetian masks

Adolfo Bioy Casares, in the short story “Venetian Masks” [original book in spanish here], makes the main character of his story, reject the possibility -that offers a friend of him- of recovering his beloved Daniela, since was made a clone of her; the "real" Daniela didn't wanted to restart an old love that didn't have any more sense for her. That replica, the clone, doesn't have interest to the hero, he doesn't love an identical woman, only loves her.

- I'm not interested in an identical woman, I love her.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, "Venetian masks" short story, final dialog.

[Cloning] Will not end being an "unfaithful photocopy" of species?. Although soma could be duplicated, could the soul be duplicated?. This is, simply, one of the so many questions that perhaps never will be answered.

In junguian psychology, the concept of person, is very bounded to the one of mask; very appropriate relation since the person is that system of adaptation, or that way with which we enter in relation to the world. And the mask is what “it hides us”, which covers the true role. The danger of this, as it maintains Jung himself, is to identify itself with the mask that we all carry; risk of stopping being a process, risk of becoming a “mask”. A clone of ourselves is a mask? or perhaps more appropriate it is to allude to a “masque” that hides the other one, that primal, that authentic one.

The masks serves so that the metamorphosis can be hidden, masks are a kind of magical act.

From the “Notebooks of bioethics" by Néstor Eduardo Costa. An old notebook from 1997.