The perpetual tension between the black and white races in South Africa are limited the nation's novelists to a consideration of the color problem, forcing them to defer answering the basic question, "what is life?" a South African novelist declared last night.

Speaking before an audience of 400 at the Loeb Drama Center, Nadine Gordimer claimed that "South Africa lacks the culture from which literature draws its real substance." She quoted Reinhold Niebuhr's criteria for a national super-entity, noting that her country has no common language, philosophy, or historical experience, no ethnic kinship, and common foe.

"The foe we fear is each other," she explained. "The black man fears the domination of the white and the white fears belonging to a minority which could be upset at any moment."

As a result, South African society is a "technological collectivity rather than a community." Because people know little about each other or themselves, she said, the novelist must first provide self-knowledge for his readers. Thus, although "the abstract Africa is becoming part of the elemental consciousness of the rest of the modern world through man's deep feeling that he must lose himself to find himself," the South African novelist must deal with his country in concrete terms. He is not yet ready to write the "pure novel of imagination."

Citing half a dozen South African novels written in the last 75 years Miss Gordimer attempted to show how the vision of their writers has been limited by "the oppressive nature of the color conflict." Most of them, she said, write within the context of an "immoral morality" based on the idea that the color bar is absolute and the mingling of races a sin.

In Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope, for example, the hero marries a Negro servant girl and is self-destroyed by this transgression. "Not murder, not lust, but the mingling of the blood is seen as his greatest prostration," she commented.