Q & H

You have wonderful ears, Shakeeb! In Ada Van Veen describes his visit to Villa Venus and mentions mollitude (cf. Molly Bloom) and the still-throbbing jolls-joyce:

Nightingales sang, when he arrived at his fabulous and ignoble destination. As usual, he experienced a surge of brutal elation as the car entered the oak avenue between two rows of phallephoric statues presenting arms. A welcome habitué of fifteen years’ standing, he had not bothered to ‘telephone’ (the new official term). A searchlight lashed him: Alas, he had come on a ‘gala’ night!

Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse, where there was a pleasant canteen for servants, with nonalcoholic drinks and a few inexpensive and homely whores. But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor. Telling Kingsley to wait a moment under the oaks, Van donned his bautta and went to investigate. His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor. The grounds were lividly illuminated and as populous as Park Avenue — an association that came very readily, since the disguises of the astute sleuths belonged to a type which reminded Van of his native land. Some of those men he even knew by sight — they used to patrol his father’s club in Manhattan whenever good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term) happened to dine there in his informal gagality. They mimed what they were accustomed to mime — grapefruit vendors, black hawkers of bananas and banjoes, obsolete, or at least untimely, ‘copying clerks’ who hurried in circles to unlikely offices, and peripatetic Russian newspaper readers slowing down to a trance stop and then strolling again behind their wide open Estotskiya Vesti. Van remembered that Mr Alexander Screepatch, the new president of the United Americas, a plethoric Russian, had flown over to see King Victor; and he correctly concluded that both were now sunk in mollitude. The comic side of the detectives’ display (befitting, perhaps, their dated notion of an American sidewalk, but hardly suiting a weirdly illuminated maze of English hedges) tempered his disappointment as he shuddered squeamishly at the thought of sharing the frolics of historical personages or contenting himself with the brave-faced girlies they had started to use and rejected.

Here a bedsheeted statue attempted to challenge Van from its marble pedestal but slipped and landed on its back in the bracken. Ignoring the sprawling god, Van returned to the still-throbbing jolls-joyce. Purple-jowled Kingsley, an old tried friend, offered to drive him to another house, ninety miles north; but Van declined upon principle and was taken back to the Albania. (3.4)

I can definitely hear the similarity — my only hesitation to attributing a direct stylistic influence (or purposeful parody) is that I wouldn't be surprised if this device were more wide-spread, and thus not trademarkably Joycean. I'd be curious to see if it pops up in, likely, other modern poetry.

There might even be examples of this device in Nabokov's own works (prior to his reading Ulysses). The closest I could find on short notice is in Invitation to a Beheading:

“[...]Cincinnatus began counting loudly and firmly: one Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before—at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.” (Reading on the computer, so I don't have the page number, but it's the very end.)

Some of the other characters in Invitation switch places and blur together, but I don't have a good quote at the moment.

Not discounting your idea, just trying to see if we can find counter-evidence.

On another note...

I haven't yet seen anyone mention this allusion to Ulysses in Pale Fire:

“Neither Shade nor I had ever been able to ascertain whence precisely those ringing sounds came—which of the five families dwelling across the road on the lower slopes of our woody hill played horseshoe quoits every other evening; but the tantalizing tingles and jingles contributed a pleasant melancholy note to the rest of Dulwich Hill’s evening sonorities—children calling to each other, children being called home, and the ecstatic barking of the boxer dog whom most of the neighbors disliked (he overturned garbage cans) greeting his master home."

"It was this medley of metallic melodies which surrounded me on that fateful, much too luminous evening of July 21 when upon roaring home from the library in my powerful car I at once went to see what my dear neighbor was doing. I had just met Sybil speeding townward and therefore nursed some hopes for the evening. I grant you I very much resembled a lean wary lover taking advantage of a young husband’s being alone in the house!"

(From note to Line 991)

One answer to "whence precisely those ringing sounds came" with their "tingles and jingles" is that, in this book about influence, they came from Joyce's Ulysses. In Ulysses, the "quoits" and their "jingling" are the sounds of Molly's bed: "the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled". Later, Bloom sees Boylan riding a horse-drawn carriage on his way to see Molly, and the harness goes "jingle jingle jaunted jingling" in anticipation of the rocking bed. In Pale Fire's parody (which I hope is obvious now), the jingling quoits and jingling horse harnesses are synthesized into horseshoe quoits, with Kinbote playing our "lean wary lover," having traded in Boylan's jaunty cab for a "powerful car."

Back to Shakeeb's observation:

It seems definitely Joycean, a seemingly absurd but poetically rhythmic interior sensation of a particular moment, etc., and it is unlikely that Nabokov would have written like this if he wrote in the 19th Century, so it could either be intentional or "cryptomnesiac."

What strikes me is that Humbert is conjugating a verb, "rolled."  Here is dictionary.com's definition of conjugate:

 1535–45; < Latin conjugālis, equivalent to con- con- + jug(um) yoke1 + -ālis -al1.

The two men, Humbert and his evil double, are "yoked" together. As in marriage, they are really One.

Within the Joyce quote, there is no "I". There is only observation of meat/taste/eat/others eat.

Humbert struggles with who/what is this "I".

Mary

Sorry to get off your main question again, but here's another related passage from Lolita (Part Two, Chapter 2):

“When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particularly violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness of my lulled heart allow her—indulgent Hum!—to visit the rose garden or children’s library across the street with a motor court neighbor’s plain little Mary and Mary’s eight-year-old brother, Lo would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling, golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The reader may well imagine what I answered my pet when—rather uncertainly, I admit—she would ask me if she could go with Carl and Al here to the roller-skating rink."

"I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let her go to one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if I accompanied her, since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. We wrangled out a compromise: I remained in the car, among other (empty) cars with their noses to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most of the other girls did. I kept counting the revolutions of the rolling crowd—and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was together with three hoodlums whom I had heard analyze a moment before the girl skaters from the outside—and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who had arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans or slacks.”

The device is almost split into two parts here, with the confusion of identities somewhat separated from the repeated "rolling" "revolutions." 

Worth mentioning too that this comes immediately before your original quote:

“All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest.”

>The schoolbook "grammatical exercise" of "precious object" seems very similar to the "conjugating" exercise of Q&H. 

>It seems to me that "lean and wary lover" is a fairly generic plot and stalking is not part of the Ulysses plot (is it?). This quote sounds more like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar's ("Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look") indicating plotting. 

Shakeeb Arzoo, I was thinking something similar today, I can't imagine any good reason for Nabokov to make a purposeful allusion to Joyce in the "I rolled" scene (and from what I understand, that has never been your point here). Besides conveying a confusion of identity, I think the device and all the "rolling" and "revolving" is somewhat sensual, possibly portraying the feeling of "coronary thrombosis," whose symptoms (skimming wikipedia) include "sharp pains around the chest area, breathing difficulties, dizziness, and fainting."

For good measure, I searched the text for "eye roll" and reminded myself how much Lolita makes this gesture, and that Quilty does it when he's shot (though I definitely don't think this adds anything to the reading of the "I rolled" scene).

Speaking of grammar books (which crossed my mind) and repetition and Joyce, I'm reminded of the beginning of Portrait:

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

As an aside: for "A noticed that B noticed that A noticed," I'm reminded of a lesson on game theory: two people are selected from an audience, come on stage, and are each given a hat to wear (the wearer can see the other's hat but cannot see their own hat). Both hats are pink. The instructor says "at least one of the hats is pink." The audience knows this to be true. Person A knows this to be true. Person B knows this to be true. But A doesn't know that B knows. And A doesn't know that B knows that A knows. And vice versa. The point being: when A knows that B knows that A knows (and on to infinity for all parties involved...) — this is our definition of "common knowledge."

As for Joyce's quoits in PF, I'll start a new thread shortly, thanks :)