Bihter Sabanoglu Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle « ESSE EST AUT PERCIPI AUT PERCIPERE » Modality of the Visible in Joyce’s Ulysses Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. W.B. Yeats Of all the many changing things, words and the protean forms that senses take are the primary occupation of Stephen and Bloom. The two protagonists seem to lose sense of the nebeneinander, (the modality of the visible and perhaps the reader’s mind) and the nacheinander, (the modality of the audible and the reading process itself) as a result of transportations or superimpositions of senses that occur throughout the episodes “Proteus” and “Lestrygonians” to the cracked tune that Chronos sings. While Stephen reflects about the possibility that the wandering earth herself should only be a sudden flaming word, Bloom offers a rather sensual and individual approach to the problem. In several passages of the above-mentioned episodes, we encounter protean forms of language. During Stephen’s interior monologue in Proteus, a reference to the nearing tide foreshadows the change in the meaning of words. Stephen’s words are volatile; they are in symbiosis with the ebb and flow. Change in the auditory properties of words dominates