[Toni Morrison's] articulation of the subliminal, subaqueous life of Moby-Dick has proved the most valuable means I have of making sense of the recent violence in the United States. More than maybe anything else, this was her project as a critic; she herself recognised that the connection between novels and the world, the author and history, the past and the present, was of great importance not only to Melville and the fractious union of the 1850s, but to her own time and place: "to question the very idea of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority... and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority... that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now."