Harold Pinter's aging male speakers: affect of exhaustion and metaphors of agency

�Does speech evoke exhaustion as a subjective affect in the experience of aging? The article traces this question by navigating through the plays of Harold Pinter. Cognitive experiments and social studies on �ageism� variously approach the effect of aging on language. Inverting this causality, the article shows how the elderly �frenemies� in Pinter's No Man's Land suggest linguistic exhaustion as the affective cause (and not effect) of aging. No Man's Land offers a culmination by not only indicating this exhaustion but also by glimpsing the agency of old age in a metaphoric capture that offers resolution. Pinter aestheticizes this �no man�s land� by turning it into a poetic metaphor, which bears an implicit critique of negative ageism. Situating the poetics of aging in dramatic language and anchoring it in the debate about the �conceptual� or �linguistic� status of metaphor opens up the exact nature of Pinter's metaphors.