The openest man of all time — openness as composure, and the cornered rat beneath

pivotal · standing

• When: standing characterization (rendered 10 Nov YDAU, scene 102)
• What: The E.T.A. consensus on Tavis: terribly shy, hiding it by being "very open and expansive and wordy and bluff," so that being around him is "excruciating." Orin and Bain's verdict was that "C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person"; Mario reads the openness as a protective shield betraying vulnerability. Either way "he's possibly the openest man of all time". Crucially, this openness is Tavis's version of social composure; when the Academy or "his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened," the danger-sign is that he goes very quiet and very still and seems, "perspectivally, to grow" — "Hal's openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with," the narration adding "It's not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat" (scene 102). Marlon Bain's gloss (n269): "genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome," dubbing him "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow."