"'we perplex and enfeeble thought"' (153). Therefore, the method of detection involves

subverting the opposition between depth and surface, between inside and out.

 The three Dupin stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie

Rog6t," and "The Purloined Letter," demonstrate Poe's most complete realization not

only of how the detective functions in modernity but also of his ability to remain outside

modernity in order to critique it. In these tales, detection amounts to a method of reading

clues that destabilizes the bourgeois boundaries between interiority and exteriority. The

detective, in other words, functions on the threshold. And it is precisely this liminality-

the ability to be "neither in nor out," as suggested by the subtitle of an earlier Poe story,

"Loss of Breath"-that attracted Walter Benjamin to the detective.

 For Benjamin, the dialectical relationship between the interior and exterior

becomes vital for analyzing modernity. Starting in the late eighteenth century, coinciding

with the birth of the modem author, Benjamin observed that the "private individual

makes his entrance on the stage of history" (AP 8). This individual is defined primarily in

terms of his ability to oppose his private home from his public place of work. Since the

city begins to be defined as a place of terror out there, the individual tries to feel secure

by believing that the interior is absolutely segregated from the exterior space. However,

such orderly distinctions are no longer possible. As Dana Polan correctly argues, the

detective is "a figure who can show the ambiguities of place, the aggressions that lie

beneath the surface of an ordered society" (237). That is exactly what Poe's detective

fiction demonstrates: the terror lies as much within as it does without. Moreover, if, as

Polan argues, "Baudelaire's Paris is the site of a certain reversibility of meanings" (236;

original emphasis), then ultimately the detective is hardly distinguishable from the