"Riffing" and Paradigm-Building

In his 1969 Postscript to Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn professes puzzlement because scholars outside the sciences read [his] main theses as applicable to many other fields as well.1 Yet those ideas, particularly the portrayal of development as succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, Kuhn also tells us, borrowed from other fields. And he names historians of literature, of music, of the arts as some of those who have long described their subjects in the same way (SSR 208). At the same time, literary historians, at least, tend to emphasize the intentionality behind revolutionary breaks in tradition as well as the effects of such breaks. Kuhn's work is compelling and original in its possible application to literary theory and practice precisely because he has chosen to study how scientific revolutions occur. His focus on methodology tests his hypothesis that tradition and innovation are different but inextricably related elements in the process of knowledge and discovery. In The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research, Kuhn stresses the importance of both convergent and divergent ways of thinking to scientific advance. Since these two modes of thought are inevitably in conflict, it will follow that the ability to support tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the prime requisites for the best sort of scientific research.2 Specifically, Kuhn argues that very often the successful scientist must simultaneously display the characteristics of the traditionalist and of the iconoclast (TET 227). Kuhn's insights about how methodologically paradigms (or disciplinary matrices, his later term) change within scientific field may also illuminate how innovations sometimes occur within literary form. I acknowledge that writers, especially novelists, given the novel's proximity, simultaneously, to what is both abiding and changeable in society, are highly individualistic and eclectic divergent, to use one of Kuhn's key words. Nevertheless, it may be that certain novelists are like Kuhn's productive scientist, characterized as a traditionalist who enjoys playing intricate games by pre-established rules in order to be successful innovator who discovers new rules and new pieces with which to play them (TET 237; my italics). Using Ralph Ellison's theory and practice of the novel as case, I want to suggest that novelist may also arrive at innovation in the form only after-and indeed

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