- Jack Woodford might have actually said it
- It works (sort of) for Anna Karenina
In Woodford's autobiography he attributes it to H. Allen Smith: https://books.google.com/books?id=AckQU9DPMnwC&pg=PT299&dq=J...
"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'"
And it's easy to attribute!
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train
That is sloppy reasoning, and it bothers me. (As it should you)
Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.
- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]
- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]
- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]
Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.
Who's making stuff up?